Welcome to our weekly feature, Watching the Web, where Patrick and I get to point you toward some watch related articles we found across the WWW, as well as highlight some of the more popular articles over the last week or so from our own site. This week, I am going to start with Pi Day before getting to the real watch related posts: the Ressence New Type 3, a list of watches that dispense with traditional hands, and some smartwatch announcement that happened this week. From our own pages we have Patrick’s review of a custom strap from 74 Watch Straps, a revival of the Angelus brand with the U10 Tourbillon Lumière, and an older review of a Michael Kors watch.
Pi Day comes around every year, but this year it is special. For a brief moment, it will be pi out to 10 digits. For those of you who forgot high school math the moment you picked up your diploma, pi is (among other things) an irrational number that relates a circle’s radius to its diameter and area. It is also 3.141592653… So on today, March 14, 2015, at 9:26 and 53 seconds, it will be 3/14/15 9:26:53, the first 10 digits of pi. Next up is e day, on February 7, 2018, but we only get 4 digits for that.
Now we can move into watch posts, and for me, Ressence sums up everything that is really cool in where analog watchmaking can go. A Blog to Watch has a summary of the features in the New Type 3, and if I had not recently bought a new car, I might have been able to drop $40,000 on one of these beauties (probably not).
Watch Time updated a previous post on 10 watches that do away with the traditional hands and indicate the time through a variety of other means. There are a lot of really interesting complications in the group of timepieces.
Something else happened with watches this week.. what was it? Oh yeah, now I recall, Apple dropped more info on their smartwatch. The announcement has been covered at ABTW, Hodinkee, and watch and mainstream news sites across the WWW. One feature in the new watch that I do find amazing is how Apple is (based on patents) reinventing 18K gold. They are mixing the metal with a much less dense ceramic to create a harder watch case, that also uses less gold by volume (but probably is not a cost savings because to Apple).
Our most popular article over the last week was Patrick’s review of a custom watch from 74 Watch Straps. I know I can’t afford to buy new watches to fit my mood, but changing the strap on a watch can really change the look and feel of one you already own. Patrick summed up the review this way, “74 Watch Straps is – as I mentioned at the outset – one of the best custom leather straps I have experienced.”
Angelus dates back to 1891, and was an innovative watchmaker producing the first waterproof automatic repeater wristwatch in 1948. The brand was felled in the 1970s, and was recently resurrected and is releasing their first new watch since that time, the Angelus U10 Tourbillon Lumière. Patrick took a look at this stunning watch that puts the tourbillon on an island (literally and figuratively), making it the undisputed star.
This write up surprised us here at WWR, and it is surprising me again with a resurgence in page views. In October of last year I took a look at the Michael Kors Jetmaster Automatic. What I liked most about it is that a pure fashion brand was putting an automatic watch into the malls at a price that fashion watch buyers could afford. That is a trend I can get behind.
We are about 1/2 way through March, so here is your weekly reminder to enter our give away for a watch from the site. This month, we have the Triwa Walter Lasen Chronograph. If you have not already entered. head over there and do so.
We also want to put the call out for wrist shots of our reader’s favorite (or at least favorite of the moment) watches. Put together an email of your wrist shot and tell us a little about the watch and why you love it. If you happened to be introduced to it through our site (or won it through a give-away), even better. Just make sure the image is a JPEG and at least 800 pixels wide.
With that, I will wrap things up. As always, if there’s something you think we should be covering, feel free to drop us a line. If you bring something up that we end up writing about, we’ll be sure to tip our hats (electronically, if not literally) in your general direction.
