De Grisogono Meccanico DG:

Devon Treadmill:

Sometime in my childhood, maybe during junior high, I decided there were three things that were symbols of adulthood: coffee, leather wallets, and analog watches. These weren’t just symbols of adulthood, but symbols of The Establishment™. I swore them all off. In late high school or early collage, I surrender to coffee, but I have held on to my digital watches, and my cloth wallets.

It hasn’t always been easy. I recently carried a leather wallet for a few days last August, and I have been flirting with the idea of an all mechanical analog watch. (It must have a spring. It must need winding. Like the Akribos XXIV AK406SS, but only more durable.) Why mechanical? Because it’s classy, and testament to precision engineering. (Interestingly enough, Wikipedia describes how the number of jewels in the a mechanical watch is essentially meaningless ad copy.) Still, a mechanical watch is analog, and the rule 12 year old Jonathan made was “no watches with hands.”

These watches from De Grisogono and Devon get around that rule. They’re all mechanical, yet still digital. Ironically, the De Grisogono Meccanio DG is the most digital, yet also the most analog. It uses a series of cams to drive the seven segment displays. It’s ingenious. The Devon Tredmill on the other hand uses belts and geneva drives(?) to display the time directly.

Yes, both of these watches are extremely expensive and constitute a luxury good, they’re goods I’d love to have, just to admire how they work.