Times Ticking Watch Talk

Times Ticking Watch Talk is a history show about watches and clocks, and it treats timepieces as characters whose pasts are worth telling. The recent episodes span more than two centuries, from 1791 to the crowdfunding era. Brand histories come up often, and each one is framed differently. Hamilton tells its own story in the first person, which turns a corporate ownership chain into something closer to a memoir. The brand talks about being worn by soldiers, conductors, pilots and film stars, about Pennsylvania railroads and Swiss ateliers, and about life in the Swatch Group since 1984 alongside Omega and Longines. From there it steps back through SSIH in 1974 to the 1966 purchase of Buren Watch Company, when it was still independent. Bulova's legacy is set out as a countdown of ten moments. These include what the episode calls the world's first TV commercial in 1941, a watch named the Lone Eagle for Charles Lindbergh, the Lady Lindy for Amelia Earhart, and the A11, a wartime watch whose second hand stopped when the crown was pulled out. The Girard-Perregaux story begins with an orphan in 1791, set beside Mozart's The Magic Flute to give a sense of the era, and moves through three gold bridges, observatory competition prizes, the Gyromatic HF and a quartz movement. Other stories work at the scale of a single part. The lever-set story begins with a head-on collision near Kipton, Ohio, in 1891, blamed on an engineer's pocket watch that stopped for four minutes and then started again. It goes on to pendant-set watches, which could be knocked out of time just by pulling the crown, to the workshops of Waltham and Elgin, and to the practical business of unscrewing the front crystal to reach the lever. The payoff is mechanical as well as dramatic. Some episodes are built around people. Leon Hatot, born in 1883, is followed from provincial beginnings to Paris, where he made slender platinum watches for women that doubled as jewelry. His bigger idea was electric time: battery-powered electromagnetic clocks, introduced in 1923, that turned up in train stations, embassies and public halls across France. The microbrand episode brings things up to the present, with solo makers and two-person teams building mechanical watches in home studios and launching them through platforms like Kickstarter. Railroads keep coming back as a thread, from Hamilton's origins to the Kipton wreck to Hatot's station clocks. The tone is admiring and cinematic, with a hook up front and dates holding the structure together. A good first listen is 'The Story of the Lever-Set', which shows the method in miniature: a disaster, a small mechanism, and the push for precision that followed. 'Who Owns Hamilton? A Legacy in 7 Chapters' suits someone curious how a name tied to Pennsylvania railroads ended up Swiss-made.