HYT H4 Metropolis, a replica watches wholesale that emits light as much as a minute repeater emits sound If there is one universal truth among watch enthusiasts (besides the fact that everyone loves the Speedmaster), it is this: nobody likes batteries. I grew up in an era when quartz watches dealt the death blow to mechanical watches (more or less), so it is easy for me to remember why I thought mechanical watches were cooler. The reason is simple, they don’t need batteries to work, and I hope to be prepared one day because I will accidentally go through a wormhole and return to the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and I want a watch that doesn’t need to change batteries. Seriously, though, battery power is somewhat interfering with things you will touch every day. The real problem with quartz watches is not that they are quartz per se: it’s that the moment you wear them, they start to fail.
However, there are some interesting developments in watchmaking today that use mechanical methods to generate electricity instead of relying on batteries. Now, we are not talking about Autoquartz or Kinetic technology (the methods that Swiss and Seiko use similar to automatic winding systems to charge batteries) – we are talking about electromechanical watches that do not use any battery system at all. We’ve already looked at the Midnight Nuit Lumineuse, which uses a piezoelectric generator (for a refresher, re-read the story here ), and of course the Seiko Spring Drive and Piaget 700P, both of which use a mainspring to drive a micro-generator that provides a steady current to the quartz timekeeping components. Then there’s URWERK, who make EMC watches; these are watches with built-in timekeeping machines driven by a hand crank (EMC watches do have capacitors, but not batteries; while both store energy, they do so in different ways).
Add to that the list, and now there’s the HYT H4 Metropolis. This replica watches best has two crowns. The upper crown, at the 2:00 position, is used to wind and set the watch. As you may already know, the unique feature of HYT watches is the use of two immiscible fluids – one clear, one coloured – pumped through a transparent tube by a pair of elastic metal bellows. The boundary line between the fluids serves as the point from which the hours are read, while the minutes are read from a traditional separate dial.
HYT projects struck me as a bit of a one-trick pony at first (albeit technically very interesting), but I’ve grown to like them more and more over the years; they’re mechanically clever, fun to wear, and just generally enjoyable, as watches like this one are. Even if their price is out of the reach of 99% of the average watch consumer (and they’re a very niche product, design-wise), they help keep the conversation interesting.
If you like the wow factor and pure fun, the HYT H4 Metropolis definitely delivers. The crown at 4 o’clock is used to charge the second mainspring, which in turn is used to power a small generator. With just a few turns of the crown, enough energy is stored in the second barrel, and if you want to know the time in the dark, you press the button in the lower crown, and this happens:
Two blue LEDs are mounted on the movement, and when you turn on the illumination, the entire movement glows. (Pushing the crown in and then releasing it shows about three seconds, and we usually get three sequences before we need to rewind the dynamo.) It’s a very pleasant effect, and not only that, it’s actually part of a fairly long tradition in watchmaking – it’s a bit like the visual cousin of the minute repeater, which was also developed to tell the time “on demand” at night. You could, and some might, describe it as meaningless, and you’d be right. But so are perpetuals, tourbillons, mechanical watches in general, cars with more than ten horsepower, the entire collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and so on. jacob & co. astronomia sky
There seem to be a lot of possibilities for using electromechanical power sources in watchmaking, and I suspect this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. With a mechanically driven, electrically powered complication like this, you get the same pleasure of direct involvement with the mechanism as with a complication like a minute repeater. Only direct human effort and interaction makes things happen. The HYT H4 and its ilk definitely have something to offer in terms of coolness.
Case: Titanium with titanium black DLC bezel. 51mm x 17.9mm. Rubber screw-down black DLC titanium crown at 2:30 and 4:30; black DLC titanium dome at 6 o’clock; convex sapphire crystal on the dial side with anti-reflective coating; screw-down sapphire case back. Water-resistant to 50 meters. 65-hour power reserve, equipped with a mechanically driven generator, manually activated dual LED lighting system illuminates the dial and displays the time “on demand” at night. best luxury watches