Watch terms

Roycropper63

Morning.

Love reading this forum but could some one explain "hacking" to me please and if there are other terms that newbies should know?

Thanks
Roy

The_Guvnor

Watch hacking, otherwise referred to as the second hand halt mechanism or seconds stop function, is a feature that allows the watch wearer to stop the movement at will. It was especially useful and advantageous to synchronize watches during wartime.

Roycropper63

Many thanks

Wibbs

The_Guvnor wrote: »

Watch hacking, otherwise referred to as the second hand halt mechanism or seconds stop function, is a feature that allows the watch wearer to stop the movement at will. It was especially useful and advantageous to synchronize watches during wartime.

Well Googled.

It's a feature that has a fair old history in timekeeping, starting with clocks. Basically yeah, it stops the train/second hand so that the timepiece can be set to a source timepiece for a couple of reasons. To check accuracy for one. It was first used in navigation chronometers(extremely accurate clocks) where a second out in navigation calculations(longitude) could mean a few miles out. It was also used in astronomy work and for purposes like railway clocks and watches. The military thing came later. For example precious few clocks and watches in WW1 could hack. A fair percentage of issued watches in WW2 couldn't hack either.

In aviation they tried a few different approaches regarding keeping accurate time on the move. Extremely accurate watches of course, but also radio time source signals that a pilot could compare against his watch and note the difference, the drift in timekeeping.

These days it's mostly another extra cool feature as accuracy in personal timepieces, mechanical movements or electronic is far less needed as we're pretty much surrounded by atomic time. Some quartz watched have picked up on the old radio time source idea and synchronise to atomic clocks, which is pretty cool.