Watches: snap or sweep?

Cars and watches have a history so intertwined you really can’t imagine one without the other. Watches have been around longer, of course, but they are the junior partner.

Watches often imitate cars. Some even contain bits of metal shaved from old cars. There’s one in this month's roundup here (pictured above) with a minute hand that looks like an old rev counter. All of the watches in that link in fact contain a watchmaking curiosity called a retrograde hand. This may seem to have been copied from cars, but wasn’t.

We all know how a normal watch hand moves – rotating 360°, aka going round and round in circles. A retrograde hand climbs from point A to point B before snapping back to the starting point and so on, as long as it keeps ticking. This might be how dashboard instruments work too, but watchmakers have been doing it for centuries.

Clocks and pocket watches with retrograde hands first appeared in the late 17th century. As watches became must-have status symbols, they were always looking for clever ways to stand out and retrograde hands later became popular with fancy brands like Vacheron Constantin, and master watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet.

A mechanical hand that goes back and forth can be used for time telling functions, with the minutes clicking zero to 60, for example, for dates, or fuel gauge-style power reserves (see that Reservoir again, above). A retrograde hand is much more technically challenging than one that goes around, simply for the gearing needed to stop, snap back to zero and restart. It therefore needs a movement with more components and comes at increased cost. Today, more affordable retrograde options get around this by using a quartz movement.

The retrograde hand has enjoyed a comeback that began during the mechanical watch revival of the Nineties. And a lot of the ones you see now are featured on motoring watches. So watchmakers had the idea, the car picked it up, and now car-inspired watches are flying the retrograde flag once again.