I guess it's sort of a passing passion, borne of a love of things mechanical. I used to fix watches, was very interested in horology, and seem to have passed this on to my sons --one of whom who has a watch lathe, makes his own balance staffs, has an electronic regulator, etc.
The other son has a bit of a collection, including a working Bulova Accutron. He also has a sawtooth pendulum clock, where the weight of the clock itself slowly "falling" along a vertical ratchet powers the pendulum. Balance-wheel sawtooth clocks are more common than the pendulum type.
When electronic watches came out (I was one of the first to buy the Texas Instruments LED one) I kind of saw the writing on the wall and started to lose interest in the purely mechanical ones.
Nevertheless, I usually ended up with all kinds of fascinating e-watches, such as one of the first Casio calculator watches, an "atomic" watch (resets time automatically from the WWV 60 KHz time signals), and a Timex Data Link watch with which you could do data transfer (shopping lists, reminders, anniversaries, etc) from your computer's CRT monitor. It even had a little "eye" on the front which could "see" the monitor's output. (This one became obsolete with the transition to LCD monitors, which the watch could not interpret.)
The "eye" is at the top of the watch face:
Nowadays, the simpler and bigger the dial face and numerals are, the better. So I have a Humvee watch which eminently suits my needs and present interests.
No need for half a dozen arcane dials, stopwatch capabilities, depth ratings to 973.5 fathoms, heart rate, or anything much more than the time.
Hells bells, I don't even bother setting the day and date anymore since I retired. Right now it reads "SUN23." Well, the day of the week is correct. Big deal.
And yet, I still remember setting my watches to the exact second from the WWV signals, and if that second hand didn't tick over at the exact time of the beep, I'd do it all over again until it was "right."
Terry, 230RN
REF:
http://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwvh.htm