hello everyone this is Jeff of Taofledermaus
while this may just look like an
old watch to you - this is actually one of
the greatest technological achievements
made in the 20st century now the
accutron was made between 1960 in 1977
it is the first watch to use a
transistor and the first watch to use a
tuning fork to regulate the time for
quite a few years this was the most
accurate watch on the market
I crudely modified the Chronos 1.4
high-speed camera into a makeshift
microscope
it's actually laughable how i did this
but it works i taped a magnifying
glass on the end of the lens and then
taped a five power eye loupe on the end of
that i also use a five-millimeter macro
ring between the lens and the camera
body and as you can see all filming was
done in a very close distance
normal watches uses what's called a
balance wheel which is kinda like a
pendulum to regulate the time but the
accutron uses an electrically-powered
tuning fork to regulate the time this
not only gave the watch a very
distinctive sound but it also reduced the
number of moving parts in the watch this
is one of the most radical changes to
how watches were made in over 300 years
Swiss inventor Max Hetzel began
working on this design around nineteen
fifty-five and they finally were able to
get these on the market around 1960
the level of miniaturization that
need to be done was just astonishing
here we see the tuning fork cups being
powered by the two very small coils each
coil has 8100 turns of insulated copper
wire the diameter of the wire is only
one-third the thickness of a human hair
and if you unraveled one of those coils
it would reach nearly 90 yards and below
but actually manufactured this wire
themselves instead of farming it out of
this coil also has a feedback coil in it
and what this does is form a servo
system if you bump the watch if the
temperature changes if the voltage of
the battery drops it will keep on
putting out 360 hz the next big
hurdle was how to convert that vibration
into rotary motion- this was accomplished
by something called the indexing
mechanism
this is where things get very small very
fast and very very precise the accutron
has a tiny gear called an index wheel
this thing is 2.4 millimeters in
diameter but has 320 teeth on it each
vibration from the tuning fork drives
this gear one tooth at a time ahead the
tiny jewel on the end of the index
finger is driven directly by the tuning
fork the pawl finger remains stationary
and prevents the index wheel from
rotating backwards and bear in mind this
is occurring 360 times a second
now when you watch this in real time it's
almost impossible to tell what's going
on because it's vibrating so fast you
can't even see the movement - the teeth on
that index are so small and so
fragile if you touch them you would
damage the teeth now to give you a sense
of scale of how small this is that's a
human hair right there now to this day
it's still a trade secret how the teeth
were cut on that tiny little index wheel
and how those two Ruby jewels were made
and made to such perfect tolerances all
the critical parts in this had to
withstand trillions and trillions of
repeat cycles of bending and moving and
rubbing without suffering metal fatigue
or just wear and tear
now considering the tiny scale of all
this occurring and the incredible speeds
and high cycle rates it was just amazing
to me to see how perfectly this thing
ran no skip teeth or crashing gears are
stripped gears everything just ran
perfectly i hope you guys enjoyed
watching this
thanks for watching