Watches: why not try something different?

An analogue watch face has a number of essential elements. An hour hand and a minute hand are bog standard. Generally there’s a seconds hand too, and possibly a date. You might add a stopwatch, a calendar or even go crazy and add a little indicator that tells you what mood the moon is in. But you need an hour hand and the minute hand, as this is how the time has always been told, right?

Wrong, actually. A quick glance at the ornate clock on the north tower of Westminster Abbey might tell you that it has two hands. But on closer inspection it in fact has just one long hand that spans the dial like a compass needle, with the pointy end telling you the time instead of which way is north.

Before the 18th century, clocks were not accurate enough to make a minute hand more than a novelty. So most clocks up until this time had only an hour hand, meaning you could read the time to roughly the nearest quarter of an hour, but not much more.

In the olde worlde, the church clock was the main source of timekeeping for the local community, whereas now they are cherished for their style, rather than their usefulness as timekeepers. The same could be said now about the wristwatch. It used to be a person’s principle way of telling the time, whereas now there are screens everywhere that tell the time better than even the most expensive watch.

You would expect the computer age to diminish a desire for wristwatches, but people can’t get enough of them. And there have been unexpected developments. You can now buy single-hand watches. You can also get retrograde hands, that snap back to zero rather than go round in a circle. You can get a mix of analogue and digital displays, and you can get watches that look like speedometers, or fuel gauges, or cockpit instruments.

Most watches do still stick to the standard hour- and minute-hand model, and this familiarity allows us to read the time without a moment’s thought. But if you want something a bit different, there has never been so much choice. Can you tell the time as well with just one hand? Not really, but how often do you really need to know the precise minute? If you do, you can always check your phone.