Basically as the title says. Anyone have anecdotes from this era?
Today’s top automatics lose a few seconds a day, which is great and all, but accuracy is essentially irrelevant since we don’t really use watches to tell time (some mission-based and medical uses will be an exception to this). Notifications from phones, smartwatches, computers and admins keep us running on time for important things. Watches are jewelry - and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But in the past, mechanical watches were the main way to tell time accurately. However a truly accurate wristwatch for the general public (i.e., quartz) wasn’t invented until the 1960s. That meant there were ~80 years of people trying to catch planes, trains and automobiles using a device that may have lost/gained quarter-minutes or more each day. Over the course of a month or two that could lead to a watch being off by multiple minutes. This would be a nuisance for things like business meetings and medical appointments, keeping people waiting, but could be a deal breaker for transit.
So how did people keep their watches accurate? Was there a number that people called regularly? A master timekeeper in town that people visited after Sunday mass? Did corporations offer time-setting and watch calibration as an employee benefit? Or did people simply operate in a world where being “on time” meant the possibility of waiting for a few minutes for the counterparty?
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