Can You Hack a Wristwatch? #Wristwatches #Shorts

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Transcript

So, can you hack a wristwatch? Well... hacking in wristwatches isn’t what it sounds like. Automatic watches, or rather, mechanical watches in general, need time adjustments ever so often. There’s mostly only one crown that allows the user to make adjustments to all the indicators. Let’s ignore this other one that’s for the rotation of the inner bezel on this Berny.

So these are screw down crowns that need to be unscrewed in order to get into adjustment mode. As soon as you are there, any clockwise rotation will wind up the watch, while rotating it anticlockwise doesn’t do anything.

If you pull out once more, rotating in either direction lets you adjust the date and day of the week, if there’s any. The outermost position is where hacking makes all the difference. When pulled out once more, here, you can adjust the time, and you’ll notice how the second hand stops moving. This is called hacking.

Now this would be obvious for someone coming from battery-operated quartz watches, but that wasn’t the case in older mechanical watches, where the watch used to continue to count time even while the time was being adjusted. Thanks to hacking in these modern movements, we can now get accurate time adjustments, or at least until at the end of the day, when it drifts by a few seconds.