Nuts and Volts - May 2014

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Random Thoughts

I read the Techknowledgey 2014 column in the March issue with great interest. I have been wearing such a device on my wrist for the past 12 years; it is the Seiko Kinetic watch.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the mechanism spinning a generator (with 'random' wrist motion) which charges a battery, which powers an analog watch (which incidentally keeps amazingly good time: ± one second in 90 days!). It is made of titanium and is not bulky.

The WITT generator is a very nice device and will certainly have many applications — particularly at sea.

Richard Turner KA8HXR

Yeah, I'd forgotten about self-winding watches. I seem to remember having one when I was a kid. I think it broke after a couple weeks.

I have always taken issue with physics teacher’s insistence that perpetual motion is physically impossible. I suppose eternal perpetual motion is, as you have to consider friction, the second law of thermodynamics, and so forth. You can certainly play forces like gravity and inertia against each other for a long, long time, however. I'm pretty sure that's how the solar system works.