A style of many names, Jump Hour, Direct Read, Mechanical Digital. Either way, watches like this tremendously bizarre automatic Sheffield have always been my favorite kind to collect.
Born from competition with the new LED/LCD digital technologies, Swiss companies had to do something. The idea had been done before, many decades prior. But it was re-imagined during the early seventies for a marketplace that wanted to see numbers instead of hands. Ultimately doomed because most people were just tired of winding their watches. The Quartz revolution was born.
But the fact was, so many of these rarities were jam-packed with originality and space-age styling.
Many many more to come...
