The potential of Babbage Watches. Inspired by digitalization, mechanical microprocessors have the potential to map completely new functions in watches.
The potential of Babbage watches:
- Irregular perpetual calendars and secular calendars running for millennia
- Display of the exact time of sunrise and sunset (according to latitude)
- Display of the equation of time (deviation of true and mean local time, precise values)
- Industrial weeks, temporal hours etc.
- Festival days, national holidays, birthdays
- Earth’s orbit around the sun, display of earth’s speed
- Solar eclipses
- Moon phase (with sphere), moon orbit
- Natural cycles in general, tides, fertility cycles, etc
The potential of Babbage Watches. Copying nautical or logarithmic tables is tedious work and even more prone to errors. The English mathematician Charles Babbage therefore suggested to the British Admiralty to build a machine for this purpose. Inspired by the new mechanical looms and by the development of automata in the emerging watchmaking industry. He combined rollers and cams in order to apply mathematical operations, which always remained the same, to different initial values with constant precision. He thus created the first, still purely mechanical calculators in the 19th century. They are the precursors of today’s computers. Ada Lovelace developed the programs to run these machines. s are created that can also reproduce irregular movements as well as forward and backward movements. Babbage clocks are, in a sense, ‘non-linear’ clocks. Their microprocessors open up elements of complex rules (algorithms) to modern haute horlogerie, that we know otherwise from computers.
