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Thermally Powered Mechanical Wristwatch
Raghu Mani writes "Theremally powered quartz wristwatches - which use minor temperature variations to generate electricity - have been around for a few years. Now here is something a lot more radical - a thermally powered mechanical watch. Invented by an American - Steven Phillips - it uses small temperature variations to wind the mainspring of the watch. A patent has been awarded for this - check out this link. A small article on the technology can be found here and the guy's own website is budapestwatchco.com. I doubt if any of us will be buying one of those watches anytime soon, though - just check out those prices ;-)."
Pfft! You're supposed to tell us about this BEFORE christmas!
Clever stuff like this DESERVES patents, not one click shopping and silly little algorythms.
Luckily I live in a country with a sane patent system!
I'm reeling from the thought that a watch can be worth more than my whole house.
Better not forget it in your pants come laundry day...
You can't take the sky from me...
This is a cool gadget. And for those wondering about body temperature.....
The back of a watch embodying the invention is selected to be of a good heat conductive material, which will influence the temperature at the coil. Tests utilizing a thermometer strapped to a wrist, as a watch is, have shown the following temperature variations. When the watch is on the arm for the day, it is subjected to high temperatures due to body heat (on the order of ninety-five degrees). Most watches are worn slightly loose. When the back of the watch is essentially flush on the arm the temperature is up, on the order of ninety degrees F. Due to a slight shift on the arm, the case acts as a heat sink and the temperature drops three to six degrees F. This occurs about every fifteen minutes at room temperatures of seventy-five to seventy eight degrees. In addition there are fluctuations in room temperature due to cycling of the heating or air conditioning thermostats. The changes in temperature at the watch are more frequent and at a wider range when the watch is worn outside. It was found that the temperature at the watch was ninety degrees plus five degrees and minus ten degrees on a day when the outside ambient temperature was fifty degrees, all temperatures being Fahrenheit. When the watch is removed at night and subjected only to ambient room temperature it will very quickly drop to ambient room temperature, usually about seventy degrees. During the night the temperature will cycle with fluctuation in room temperature as the thermostatically controlled heat cycles. When the wearer again puts on the watch in the morning, there will be an increase in temperature of the watch casing back up to the external body temperature of the wearer. Change in temperature in either direction will produce self-winding of a watch embodying the invention.
Truly a perpetual watch!
For comparison, the Pulsar, the first digital watch the on the market, cost $2100. A couple years later digital watches were under $20 from Texas Instruments, and just a couple of years after that TI was out of the watch business because they couldn't compete against $4 imports.
This isn't saying that self-winding watches will take off in the same way; it's just comparing the prices of mass-production stuff versus very low rate production.
No, patents are important. But I think the system needs some changes. At the moment patents are very easy to get. In austraila someone managed to patent the wheel a few years back. They patented it as the "circular transportation facilitation device". In the US an anti-patent person noticed their child using a swing sideways and applied for a patent on sideways swinging. They got it. The ausie patent was done on a fast-track application, but the US swing was a normal patent subject to the same scrutiny as any other (ie zero). Other famous patents are IBMs famous patent for a computerised airplane toilet queueing system and Microsofts patent on the ASF format, which they used to bully Virtualdub because it could transcode ASF.
At those prices, you'd think he could afford a spell checker. I've been reading the site for 5 minutes and already found 3 errors.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Loophole spoted. This only covers energy sources which are subject to angular deflection. Use something like a smaller version of the temperature-compensated pendulum and you get liner deflection not covered by the patent. You can convert that o angular using a rack-and-gear if you need angular to drive the mechanism.
I can see they are of great quality, ( all the best timepieces ARE mechanical ) and are worth quite a bit ..
....
But 100k??? That is a bit steep, even for this
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Buy a 9$ watch, spend 20000$ on batteries, save yourself 9991$ compared to the prices of their watches.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Criminy. They'll give patents for ANYthing these days...
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
Here's a link,
Here's a link,
why don't I just
link the google search page?
Anyone remember memory metals? They were sort of a greeting card fad for a
while..You would mail a loved one what looked like an unbent paper clip, with
instructions to dip it into hot coffee. Upon hitting the hot coffee the metal
would bend itself into a message. Really neat stuff if you ever got to play with
it.
. I never bothered to open it and play with it, but he said it had something to do with the pendulum action of your arms... Still works like a charm today.
For us carnivores, "Sucking the marrow out of life" isn't a transcendentalist philosophy but a practical instruction.
Rolex...17 years old and still sweeping (Rolex's don't tick).
Excellent, now we finally can have mechanical power generated from temperature fluctuations. All we need now is some sort of a machine to convert mechanical power into electrical and we have a new type of energy generator... hmmmm ... but where to get such a machine?!
You can't handle the truth.
... you would automatically help the investigators by telling them when exactly have you died....
This device is able to use human body heat to create enough usable energy to drive a fairly simple mechanical device.
Let's extend this, playing futurist a bit. The same technology is applied to all the interior surfaces of your clothes, meaning that all your radiated body heat is put to use. Now, your wearable technologies need either smaller batteries, since they are trickle charged all day long by your body heat. Maybe your clothes have an air conditioner built in driven by body heat, maybe you just power a flat panel PDA on your wrist.
I'd keep an eye on this type of technology...reclaiming wasted energy could have huge implications for portable technologies of all kinds.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
If you're into mechanical watches, check out www.timezone.com. It's a website for watch geeks with an active message board.
The Steven Phillips watches built here look awfully impressive. Too bad about the style, particularly the enamelling. There's a reason perlage is the standard movement decoration.
Do people still wear watches? With all of the devices that surround us every day that give the time and date, I'm surprised that watches are are sold and used any more.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
They are just trying to get us fired up about so that when they start selling next month on thinkgeek they will make a load of money.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
There is a much more detailed write-up on this in International Wrist Watch magazine (they have a website but the article is not there). Imagine an automatic wristwatch that does not even have to be wound but stays running all the time!
What's more, a "side-effect" of this is that the watch has become vastly more accurate. The rate at which mechanical watches run is dependent on the tension in the mainspring - and since that isn't constant (even in regularly worn automatic watches) mechanical watches (even the most accurate ones) tend to lose or gain a few seconds a day.
The "eternal winding" mechanism somehow manages to keep the tension in the mainspring fairly constant - so the watch's rate varies a lot less and it ends up being about as accurate as a quartz watch!
The ridiculous price is only because these are a limited edition set of watches made by the inventor. According to the article, he intends to sell his patent to a bug watch manufacturer. If Rolex or Omega, for instance, gets hold of it, they will probably incorporate these in their regular watches and the price will, in time, come down to the same as regular Rolex/Omega prices (which aren't exactly cheap but not this expensive either).
- HCE
That is so cool! Uh, wait!
No, no it's so hot, uh, cool...wait!
*ducks*
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Yep, you're right. I was just about to make a similar post myself.
The temperature differential thing is new and neat, but other types of self-winding mechanical watches have been around for more than fifty years.
I have a handsome "Clipper Automatic" watch that my father used to wear all the time. Like most self-winding watches it's kept wound by movement of the arm and wrist. The mechanism still works even after years of sitting forgotten in a drawer.
It's the innovative power supply and it's potential uses, silly.
Why, this is close to a perpetual motion machine (and temperature variations abound)....
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I can't believe how many here don't understand the significance..
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Hence, my trusty kinetic watch is effectively equivalent but a lot more affordable.
If you stopped eating for long enough, I bet that the watch would stop also...
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Clocks, perhaps...but watches? Given the difficulties often encountered when trying to scale mechanical systems down to smaller sizes, I doubt that claiming a thermally-powered clock as prior art WRT a patent on a thermally-powered watch would fly.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.