If you pay attention to what I wear (why would you, that would be weird), you might think that I rarely wear quartz watches, that every movement in my watch collection derives from the mind of Adolf Schild and Abraham-Louis Breguet before him. Not quite true. At night and on weekends I am just as likely to be sporting my old Pulsar or a Columbia field watch that my wife gave me years ago. I have a few more as well. For example, I have never owned a manual wind chronograph, sticking with the safe and less costly quartz models.
But quartz has been treated as a second-class citizen by watch aficionados for more than two decades. Why exactly, I have never worked out. They are less expensive to produce and are nearly always more accurate until you get into very expensive and exclusive watches. It is their low cost that is often a complaint, as if a change after hundreds of years of stasis in an industry, and then a sudden breakthrough in watch movements, should be held against them. It is a Luddite complaint. Battery changes are easy enough and Amazon will deliver the exact battery to your door.
Seriously, what changed or improved in watch movements in the hundreds of years before quartz? There were cheaper and less accurate improvements: the pin pallets of Georges Frederic Roskopf. The battery powered electric watches of Hamilton and Bulova were not as accurate as quartz and were tricky to work on. Most are dead and gone compared with their mechanical brethren that can survive for years at the back of drawers waiting to be revived. Waterproofing and anti-magnetism were gradual improvements, not revolutionary ones. On the plus side there was shock protection from 1927 (Incaflex) to 1934 (Incabloc). That’s not a lot.
Is it the lack of smooth sweep with the second hand that keeps some away from quartz? I will admit to being a fan of the smoother mechanical seconds display. But for the limited amount of time that you look at your watch (assuming that you are not one of those who just endlessly ogles your watch instead of being present in the moment), does a slightly jagged movement really mean all of that? The movement of a mechanical center seconds is also jagged, just less perceptibly. That can’t be enough to justify a larger outlay of personal wealth for the mechanical alternative. The doctor may prescribe a Precisionist for that.
But by far the complaint about quartz watches that drives me around the bend the most is that “quartz watches don’t have soul.” So, after more than five millennia of civilization and perhaps one hundred millennia of religious thought, we land just where we started. It is as if the elevation of Reason in the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution never happened. The development of the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism have made no impact on us: watches have souls. Our first instinct is to revert to Animism.
The belief that all things are inhibited by spirits is part of the basis for all ancient religious thought and practice.[1] This is the impulse behind the sacred groves of the Native Americans, Druids, and the Romuva.[2] The Romans believed in numen, a spirit that dwelt in all things. To express an opinion that some watches have “no soul” is to imply that mechanical watches have some animating spirit. These are not deep thinkers expressing this opinion, these are the watch loving followers of Tengri who are looking for the harmony of the universe in the pinions and gears of an ETA 2428.[3] It is silly to talk about “soul” and watches in the same sentence. It is emotive rather than explanatory. None of these little time telling trinkets have an animating spirit, a soul. They are there to look good and tell the time, in that order. They don’t “speak to us”. Now, if you don’t mind, I am going to take my field watch to the sacred grove under a forgiving sky. Get outside. It is good for the mind and body. Tengri says so.
[1] Also, a related complaint: to all of those “I am Spiritual, but not religious” people. No, you are just superstitious. You believe in vortexes in the Arizona desert because you are too incurious to entertain the concepts of Logos or of samsara.
[2] The Crusades were also waged against the Lithuanians, the last pagan Europeans.
[3] If not Tengri, any sky god will do. There is quite a list. It includes El, which is an interesting path for any monotheist to travel.
The Escapement Room 
I know quartz are more precise & cheaper to produce & I understand the why’s & how’s of their workings, but there’s just something about seeing a balance wheel oscillate and a pallet fork tick & tock, back & forth. I can see why it works, I can feel it, and were it not for my rock n’ roll hearing disorder, I could hear it. I can’t see, feel or hear the movement of a typical quartz watch operate like I can a mechanical movement.
I think part of it is that while a mechanical movement is magical, it still looks like something any of us could have figured out on our own & accomplished. A quartz takes scientists.
Yes, I’m drawing a line where I think humans should have stopped innovating in watches, but I’m thinking we should have stopped before we put touchscreens in cars too.
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All the good stuff is usually hidden behind a solid caseback, so most of us don’t see anything until we “pop the back” as Chris says. I rarely feel anything aside from the occasional rotor wobble. My loudest watch was a quartz Timex Weekender.
There is a certain appealing steampunk aesthetic to mechanical watches, but most of us only know vaguely how they work. The irony of your argument is that because we can seemingly figure them out, they appear magical. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? The first quartz watches were only steps away from mechanical watches. I have owned an eleven jewel movement quartz watch. It used to be that transistors appeared to be magical compared to tubes. Big old gears belong in the Smithsonian, not in every watch. The magic should be in the mystery, not in the easily explained.
Magic and nostalgia are not the same phenomena.
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I didn’t know Lithuanian Pagans had to deal with Crusaders. You learn something new everyday.
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It is ill-conceived prejudice for sure but there is some marginal rationality to relating to the thing that is more constantly in motion compared to the one that lurches more incrementally.
People that are spiritual but not religious are generally into evil spirits.
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