Category Archives: design

The Everyman Watch of 1938

design, Hacking

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Quick Background

This is different than things I usually post about. There have been some exciting developments on my other projects and I hope to post on those soon.

While cleaning out some old family items, I recently came across a few pocket watches. I was immediately drawn in by this piece: a Westclox Pocket Ben watch. I was intrigued in no small part because it is a dollar watch; a category of watch targeted the average person. A slight personal fascination with mechanical watches helped too.

Mechanical Era

We often talk about the democratizing potential of new technologies. I don’t have much personal context on this beyond the information age of smartphones and the Internet. However, were I a betting man I’d wager this effort to democratize technological advances is far from new. I think mechanical watches are both a historical example of this and the pinnacle of their era.

Tear Down

The watch was not working when I received it, the second hand broken off and it seems it had not worked for some time. It’s not a particularly valuable watch in any condition. I timeboxed several hours yesterday to attempt to take it apart and understand how it works. Here’s what I learned:

  • This watch was stamped “38” on the movement, signifying it was made in 1938.
  • There is no magic. The internals of the watch expose its secrets, gears and springs mostly.
  • Watches are assembled by hand, therefore they can be understood with eyes and manipulated with hands.
  • Be discerning: trust your hands, don’t be forceful but the pieces sometimes need caressing.
  • Westclox took a number of shortcuts to save money, particularly leaving the spring exposed, and sometimes replacing gears with pins that are distributed to fake acting as gears.
  • Despite being relatively low cost and a few shortcuts, the work is honest, glue was avoided oil minimal and tolerances respected.
  • The balancer is attached to the back of movement, which means the watch basically has to be assembled from the back forward. It would have been nice to learn this one earlier than being one step away from back together.

Community

There is a small online community interested in watches like these (surprise, online community). One particularly helpful source was two videos showing a very honest dissection and assembly of these watches, the videos highlight the creators thoughts and frustrations. He clearly has much more experience than I with watches and tools that are better equipped.
The disassembly video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAMU64fzuKU
The reassembly video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKnS61s1diE

I would be curious to know more about these watches from a historical perspective. I think it would also be particularly interesting to do an interview with people who worked on devices like this. Semi-specialized hand labor was a trademark of 20th century industry and is quickly fading. I imagine the story of watches like this will fade unless recorded soon.

References

I liked this page showing some the various Westclox Pocket Ben watches. The watch I have pretty clearly is closest to the advertised 1933 watch, which matches the printed 1938 date.

Next up

I unfortunately didn’t finish reassembling the watch. I was one step away from having it back together when I realized that the balancer must be integrated much sooner. This resulted in me assembling in the opposite direction and unable to finish in the time I had allotted. I hope to someday have a chance to revisit this.

Restaurant Week DC!

Computers, design, Hacking, Web

I found out today that it is Restaurant week in DC. I quickly found the official website, and equally quickly found out that it was hard for me to figure out things I wanted to know, like where these restaurants are, and what Yelp thinks of them. The only logical conclusion was to make a website do exactly that. I ended up using my site to find a place to eat for dinner, and it was delicious 🙂

Currently, I’ve overrun my Yelp requests for the day, I’m going to work on getting the Yelp functionality integrated again, ASAP.

Check out the site at r.prometheusx.net, what do you think?

Basic screenshot of the DC Restaurant Week 2012 application

Technical Details

Gathering the information

In order to gather information about all of the restaurants from the official site at first I was a little unsure. Then I realized I could just use jQuery to gather all of the elements and create a json object that I could use directly in this page.

Below is the bulk of my parsing code, I was then able to JSON.stringify an array of these restaurant objects to easily copy the data.

  $('.formfont_black b').each(function (){
    var parentColumn = $(this).closest('td');
    var restaurant = {};
    restaurant.name = $(this).html();
    restaurant.url = $(this).closest('a').attr('href');
    var lineSplit = parentColumn.html().split('<br>');
    restaurant.addr = lineSplit[1];
    restaurant.phone = lineSplit[2];
}

What database?

I thought about setting up a quick Rails application for the backend of this, but then realized that there was really limited value in a database since this information is all static, and there’s not that much of it. Therefore, I’ve dumped most of the content directly into the javascript files. If this were a more serious application this could easily be adjusted.

Third Party Integration

Google – I quickly realized that the geocoding API for Google Maps was severely going to throttle my ability to look up restaurants. It limits you to, I believe, ~11 queries per second. Therefore, in order to map all 250 restaurants, I mapped them once and just saved that data into a JSON map, the same way as the restaurant information.

I’ve pasted my hacked together method to get all of the geocoded information. I was then able to JSON.stringify() the result

      function geocode_address(map, geocoder, restaurant){
        geocoder.geocode( {address:restaurant.address}, function(results, status){
          if (status == google.maps.GeocoderStatus.OK) {
          var marker = new google.maps.Marker({map:map, position:results[0].geometry.location});
          google.maps.event.addListener(marker, 'click', function(){
            yelpRequest(restaurant, marker);
            });
          good++;
          goodAddresses[restaurant.address] = results[0].geometry.location;
          }
          else {
            bad++;
            setTimeout(function(){
              geocode_address(map,geocoder,restaurant);
            }, 100);
          }
        });

Yelp – this integration initially went pretty smoothly other than the fact the Yelp API does not like to let you have users directly authenticate which is a serious problem when I’m running the application without a backend. Now, I’ve run into the problem of hitting the ridiculously small number of daily queries (100). I’m working on getting this upgraded.