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Could Steampunk Save Us? | The New Yorker

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This summer, I bought my wife a vintage watch—a model called the Big Crown Pointer Date, made by the Swiss company Oris. The watch was manufactured in 1995, and is small, elegant, and mechanical, which means that it doesn’t contain a battery; instead, you wind it, and it tells the time using an ingenious system of gears. The Pointer Date takes its name from what watch people call a “complication”—an added feature beyond timekeeping. It has a fourth hand, which reaches out to the edge of its face, where the numbers one to thirty-one are arranged. At midnight, the hand ticks forward, making it possible to see one’s progress through the month as a movement around a circle. Even though the watch was assembled by hand nearly thirty years ago, it still works perfectly. But “perfectly” has a particular meaning for a mechanical watch. Not every month has thirty-one days, and so the date must be periodically adjusted. Moreover, its timekeeping drifts by a few seconds each day; as a result, my w

Save this story Save this story This summer, I bought my wife a vintage watch—a model called the Big Crown Pointer Date, made by the Swiss company Oris. The watch was manufactured in 1995, and is small, elegant, and mechanical, which means that it doesn’t contain a battery; instead, you wind it, and it tells the time using an ingenious system of gears. The Pointer Date takes its name from what watch people call a “complication”—an added feature beyond timekeeping. It has a fourth hand, which reaches out to the edge of its face, where the numbers one to thirty-one are arranged. At midnight, the

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