Discover the power behind what makes your watch tick.
It’s hard to tell from looking at the outside of your watch just how powerful the movement mechanisms inside it are. While watch movements have evolved greatly over the years, the premise of telling time with precision and style remains the same. From high-accuracy quartz movement to Swiss automatic movement powered by your motion, we’ll dive into the different types of watch movements to explain the inner workings of everyone’s favorite wrist accessory.
What is a Watch Movement?
Watch movement, sometimes also referred to as watch caliber, defines the engine of the watch, or in other words, what makes the watch work. While it’s often hard to tell a watch’s movement from just looking at its exterior, the beauty of its interior workings are often just as stunning as the exterior. But before we get into the different watch movement types, it’s important to understand the difference between a watch movement and a watch type.
Watch Movement vs. Watch Type
As we just explained, a watch movement refers to the inner workings of a watch that makes it tick and tell time accurately. A watch type is rather a categorization based on its specific design or additional features. There are a ton of different watch types we could go into, but some of the most popular ones include dive watches, sports watches, chronograph watches, dress watches, and more. The biggest distinction between watch type and watch movement is that a watch type (like a dive watch) can often be built with a variety of watch movement types to power it.
Read our types of watch styles post if you want to learn more about different watch types.
Types of Watch Movements
There are three main types of watch movements: quartz, automatic, and mechanical. Each comes with its own set of unique characteristics as well as pros and cons. When purchasing a new watch, you’ll want to decide which watch movement type best fits your wants and needs. Let’s get a closer look into each type of movement.
Mechanical
When the inception of telling time moved from clocks to wristwatches, the mechanical watch movement was born. The oldie but goodie, mechanical watch movements can be traced back 100 years further than the automatic movement from the 1770s. The mechanical movement works through a mainspring connected to the watch hands that requires manual winding through the crown metal knob on the outside of the watch face.
This winding is required often daily and needs careful attention so as to not damage the watch movement. Some of our tips for manual winding include removing the watch prior to winding and not winding past the tension or tightness on the crown.
Pros:
- No battery, no need for battery replacements
- Craftsmanship to the nines
Cons:
- Needs to be wound to operate
- Sometimes can require more maintenance than other watch movements
Automatic
Automatic movements are arguably one of the most popular watch movement types today. The automatic movement represents the evolution of the mechanical movement. The automatic movement can be traced all the way back to Switzerland in the 1770s and are essentially self-winding mechanical watches. This means you don’t have to manually wind your watch every day to set the time properly. An automatic watch is powered instead by a person’s movement generating energy to the watch. This occurs through the watch’s mainspring being wound by a rotor that spins when worn. Built from many intricate pieces, automatic movement requires careful construction, but it doesn’t require a battery, which means it can be worn for many years without maintenance.
Here’s our quick and dirty pros and cons list if you’re trying to decide between quartz, automatic, or mechanical watch movement type.
Pros:
- No battery, no need for battery replacements
- Average guaranteed time accuracy of -4/+6 seconds per day
- Low maintenance
Cons:
- Can be more expensive than other watch movement types
Quartz
I.E. the new kid on the block. Automatic and mechanical movements are still some of the most common watch movement types, but the quartz movement is on the rise. The quartz movement was born out of watchmakers’ desire to create an even more accurate and energy-efficient watch. Quartz watches were first introduced in December 1969 by the Japanese watchmaker Seiko but Girard-Perregaux and the Caliber 350 were really the ones to set the standard for quartz oscillation two years later.
So what makes it different than your typical automatic or mechanical movement? Unlike the previous movements, quartz watches don’t get their oscillating movement from a spring and wheel, but instead, get it from a tiny quartz crystal cut into a small tuning fork. Quartz contains piezoelectric properties, meaning it can produce a small volt of electricity. When this occurs, it naturally vibrates at an exact, constant frequency of 32,768 times per second. This is the secret that enables quartz movement to boast the time extreme accuracy it does. Inside a quartz watch, a battery provides a current to a microchip circuit, where because of its piezoelectric properties, the quartz’s oscillations occur at an almost perfect frequency of 32,778 times per second. These oscillations are then reduced in the microchip circuit to one electric pulse per second. This pulse drives the tiny motor and tiny gears in the watch to move the hour, minute, and seconds hands with the most accurate time precision to date.
Pretty cool, huh? Here’s our quick and dirty pros and cons list if you’re trying to decide between quartz, automatic, or mechanical watch movement type.
Pros:
- Average guaranteed time accuracy of +/-10-15 seconds per year
- More design options because of its slimmer, smaller, and flatter profile
- Power reserves can keep a quartz watch going for years without maintenance
Cons:
- Changes in temperatures can subtly affect how many times quartz oscillates per second, affecting its time precision (if you don’t have a high-accuracy quartz movement)
Which Watch Movement Type is Best For You?
When it comes to choosing the best watch movement for you, you can see there are a few factors you’ll want to keep in mind including the amount of time you want to devote to upkeep, your budget considerations, and your time precision preferences. Although you really can’t go wrong with any watch movement type. Each comes with its own unique characteristics that drive its time accuracy, style, and ticking abilities.
Lucky for you, Shinola has watches for every wearers’ watch movement type preference with our own mechanical, automatic, and quartz movements. Browse our watches today and discover our Automatic Sellita SW200-1 Movement, Argonite 1069 Quartz Movement, and more.