The Gliding Seconds Hand
…and how we experience time.
My earliest memory of a smoothly gliding seconds hand, with no discernible ticking of the hand, was probably formed from a cheap quartz wall clock. When considering wall clocks, to this day the gliding second hand feels to me like a gimmick to get away from the curse of the quartz powered timekeeper: the dreaded juddering of the one tick per second which still connotes mass production, cheap materials and manufacturing, and the inescapable inferiority compared to a mechanical timekeeper.
The perceived luxury - or lack thereof - of a particular timekeeping technology aside, it is interesting to examine the development of the gliding seconds hand from a horological perspective, and its relationship to our perception of the passage of time.
The gliding second hand is one that is imperceptibly smooth in its motion round a watch dial. The human eye can still make out the ticks of a mechanical watch with an oscillator running at 4 Hz or 5 Hz; the latter rate translates to ten ticks per second and looking closely at a watch dial will still show the observer the discrete jumps on a Grand Seiko Hi-Beat, for example.
They are minuscule jumps - ten in one second! - but they are still perceptible to the naked eye. Compare that to the Frederique Constant Monolithic with an oscillator frequency of 40 Hz - the highest ever in a mass-produced mechanical watch - that ticks 80 times per second and runs truly imperceptibly smoothly. Spring Drive movements, among others, similarly have a seconds hand that glides smoothly.
But why does a gliding seconds hand matter in the first place?
For me, it starts with asking what time is.
It never stops, it always passes and as conscious beings we experience it as a continuum of lived, experienced moments in the present. The past is a recollection from memory, the future is only speculation, and both exist necessarily in our own minds only, even though we live out the arrow of time and march inevitably, invariably, and inexorably from the past to the present, and into the future.
And as so much else about the physical world we inhabit, we can try to understand it and impose structure and order on time. We can measure periods of time, but those measurements do not define time, nor are they necessary to experience it. Fundamentally, as a property of spacetime it is a continuous variable, and this is before we consider general relativity and the curvature of spacetime. That means it is beyond our capacity to precisely measure time: no matter how accurate and precise our measurements become, they are not and cannot be accurate and precise enough, because for a continuous variable that is by definition impossible.
This of course does not mean we cannot measure time, or that we should not. In fact, it is a proud accomplishment of human ingenuity that we have created clocks in use in this era that can measure time accurate to 1 second over the lifetime of the universe. NIST, which sets the reference time in the US, relies on atomic clocks accurate to a second in 100 million years, which is over 10,000 times the length of all of recorded human history. It's still only 100 million years, though. In other ways, our lack of precision in timekeeping is even worse.
We define a year as 365 days, even though it's really not the time it takes to complete one orbit around the sun. We define a day as 24 hours, even though it's really not the time it takes to complete one revolution around the earth's own axis. We define a second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom, notwithstanding our inability to count those vibrations absolutely accurately, precisely, and reliably.
Even a second, of course, is an attempt to discretize a continuous variable and certainly its definition has nothing to do with our lived experience of time. A better way to illustrate the point is to imagine a world where a second was actually five seconds long. There would be innumerable moments we would live through and experience in this larger second. Even in the real world, and in an actual second, we are still able to perceive many moments. We can all think multiple discrete thoughts in a single second, and the more keen-eyed among us can even discern who crossed the finish line first in a closely contested sprint race. Indeed umpires in several sports are expected to have a sharply honed perception of time. Sooner or later, however, our senses fail us and we must rely on instruments for ever smaller and finer measurements of time.
This is a big part of why the second is not five seconds long: our own senses can perceive time far more precisely than that. It is why watches that tick once per second can seem, if we pay close attention, imprecise and "slow". It is also why mechanical watches with anywhere from four to ten ticks per second appear to more closely resemble our innate conception of the fluid passage of time. And it is why the gliding seconds hand is such a fascinating horological invention. Leaving aside for the moment how accurate or precise these watches may be, their motion most closely equates to our own lived experience of time. More than any other type of timekeeping technology, the gliding seconds hand alone forces us to confront the reality of being alive, conscious, and present only in the current moment: leaving behind past moments and marching into the future.
Many pathways to the same magical experience
It would seem, then, that the threshold beyond which the perception of ticks to the naked eye fails, is north of the Breguet's 10 Hz and possibly short of the Frederique Constant's 40 Hz
Of course there are a few different types of mechanisms that by now have produced a smoothly gliding seconds hand, in addition to the aforementioned quartz, Monolithic and Spring Drive movements there are electrical, electronic and tuning fork movements from 1957-1960 that pioneered the gliding seconds hand, even though it does not appear from a review of their marketing materials that they leaned heavily on this aspect of the watch wearing experience. Even the Accutron Spaceview has a smoothly gliding seconds hand powered by an electrostatic movement (although its dependence on a conventional quartz crystal setup for the actual timekeeping function of the watch is a sleight of hand).
The Breguet 7727 with a 10 Hz oscillator has a tiny hand in a subdial that completes one revolution per second, while the 8 Hz Chopard Alpine Eagle Cadence still has ticks perceptible to the naked eye. It would seem, then, that the threshold beyond which the perception of ticks (in a mechanical movement) to the naked eye fails, is north of the Breguet's 10 Hz and possibly short of the Frederique Constant's 40 Hz (incidentally also the only fully mechanical movement with a gliding seconds hand).
Wearing a Spring Drive watch has been an educational experience for me. At first my eyes registered the motion of its gliding seconds hand and immediately skipped ahead round the dial to see the hand catch up at the speed I thought it would, only to be surprised to find it moving slower than expected.
This brought on the realization that my internal clock is faulty and perpetually impatiently wants to skip ahead. I was having trouble staying in the present moment, instead willing the seconds hand to hurry and catch up, just so my eyes could outrun it on the dial again, notwithstanding the ludicrousness of competing with a tiny shard of metal.
All we have is the present moment: strapping a watch to my wrist is not what I thought would lead me back to this life lesson, but I am glad to relearn it every time I look at my wrist.
I am grateful to
for helping edit this essay, adding the photographs that helped bring it to vivid life, and for providing the final push of motivation to get it published.
Well done, time to start editing the next one! 😄
🤖👽🤯😑....I’ll need some more “time” with this ☝🏻 .....🙏🏻