Which watch do you prefer? Vintage cuckoo or modern electronic? Do you wear a mechanical watch on your wrist or do you just use the watch built into your phone? Or are you a happy owner of an "eternal" watch?
At all times, inventors have strived to create something that works on its own, endlessly and without human intervention. It is believed that it was the attempts to create a perpetual motion machine that laid the foundation for mechanics and thermodynamics. The modern world in which we live is more likely to consider perpetual motion technology to be impossible and pseudoscientific than to accept it.
For many years, watchmakers racked their brains to create a perpetual motion machine. And … they succeeded. But let's start in order.
• Around 1150, the first scheme of a perpetual motion machine was presented by the Indian Bhaskara.
• Records of Leonardo da Vinci's schemes found a little later indicate that he was also fascinated by the search for the design of a perpetual motion machine.
• In the 18th century, watchmaker James Cox proved that the movement can be "almost eternal". In 1774 he created a watch in London that did not need to be wound. The watch was accompanied by six-sheet documents in which Cox explained how it worked.
The propelling force in Cox's watch was mercury. With a drop in atmospheric pressure, mercury, falling or rising inside the glass tube, turned the wheel that connects the watch with the mercury barometer, and thereby wound the clock. According to the inventor, there is practically no internal friction in the watch movement and thus its watch is protected from decay, i.e. he invented the "eternal" machine. Since 1961, the "silent" watches without mercury have been kept in the museum.
* Eternal * Cox's clock.
Promotional video:
In 1928, engineer Jean-Léon Reitter invented a unique watch that could work without winding for an unlimited amount of time. In June 1929, the first sales of Atmos watches began. It is not known how many watches were sold at that moment.
Very soon, in the 30s, the Jaeger-LeCoultre company improved and patented the development. In 1936, they launched the production of the eternal Atmos.
The watch's energy source is a hermetically sealed capsule. Inside it contains a mixture of a special liquid (ethyl chloride) and gas, which contracts or expands when the temperature changes, thereby forcing the capsule to move and twist the mainspring. A change in temperature of one degree (in the range from 15 to 30 ° C) guarantees the factory for two days of clock operation.
Watch parts do not need lubrication and are finely tuned to virtually eliminate wear. Each model is hand-made in Switzerland, it takes about a month and then the same amount of time is required to check and adjust the watch. The pendulum hangs on a steel thread thinner than a human hair and only vibrates twice a minute. The pendulum of an ordinary clock makes one hundred and fifty times more oscillations.
In theory, the clock can work without human intervention for more than 500 years, but due to the "poor quality" air these days, the manufacturer still recommends cleaning the Atmos once every twenty years.
The watch was owned by such famous personalities as Charlie Chaplin, John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill.
The virtuoso watchmakers who create Atmos never cease to amaze with their ingenuity: some models of watches are equipped with a moon phase indicator and a dial on which the hand slowly measures the years until the fourth millennium.