Oddities of the Day - Vintage Certina Biostar Biorhythm Watch

Maybe the first and hopefully the last Biorhythm watch in history. For those of you lucky enough to not know what Biorhythms are, Wikipedia describes it; "The theory of biorhythms claims that one's life is affected by rhythmic biological cycles, and seeks to make predictions regarding these cycles and the personal ease of carrying out tasks related to the cycles."

Certina made a few varieties of this pseudo-scientific electronic watch all featuring a rainbow of three rings marked with random numbers for love, health and some other nonsense. Oh those silly dirty hippies...

1970s Certina Biostar Varieties

Biostar Caseback

And now for something completely different...

Below is a cheapo vintage watch by Continental from the late sixties/early seventies. A fellow collector Ruud has pointed out an oddity that we can not figure out. Perhaps you might have a guess? The watch has three seconds hands. Two in the center that appear forked and then the sub-seconds at six. This is not a chronograph, there is no stopwatch function, just the time and three indications for seconds...

Update:
Here is one opinion...from Fook in Singapore;

"Is the white hand luminous? Maybe its for the use when its dark. Looking at it now, when surrounding is bright, the red hand is very prominent whereas the white one is less so."

And just in from inventor Greg Blonder with what I believe to be the correct answer;

I'm pretty sure the two hands are used to start a race. As they get close to "12" you say "on your mark". When the first hand hits 12 you say "set", and when the second hand, three seconds later hits 12, say "go". A cheap version of a sailing or track and field watch.


See Also;
All Offbeat Watch Posts-->LINK
All Vintage Watch Posts-->LINK


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TIME IS RELATIVELY FOR SALE - ALBERT EINSTEIN'S WATCH UP FOR AUCTION!

Probably one of the more interesting objects you could own from Albert Einstein. Einstein once said, "the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." Too bad we can't ask him what a real timepiece should look like...

And if you'd like to own his personal Longines wristwatch from 1930, here is your chance. Antiquorum is auctioning it off October 16th in New York City.

Valued between $25,000 and $35,000, I imagine it will go much higher. They will provide photos showing Einstein wearing the watch. Auction press release-->Link


SEE ALSO;
All Watchismo Times Antique Timepiece Posts
All Vintage Watch Posts



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The Secret Life of Machines

A great episode of the late eighties BBC series "The Secret Life of Machines". This particular episode (featured in three parts below) focuses on the development and technology leading up to quartz watches but there is much much more in this show. Everything from sundials, water clocks, church clocks, mechanical pocket watches, the first wristwatches, vintage watch commercials, electric, tuning fork, solid state, LCD, LED, and the modern analog Quartz.

Part 1 --> Link (or click play above)



Part 2 --> Link (or click play above)



Part 3 --> Link (or click play above)

See Also;
All Watch & Clock History Posts-->Link

via WatchesCorner


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Math Watches Part 2.1249 - Vintage 1960s Juvenia Protractor Watch

Not long ago I featured some of the coolest in vintage geek wristwear with my Math Watches post-->here. And thought I'd follow it up with a phenomenally rare opportunity to own this vintage 60's Juvenia. The hour hand is a miniature protractor, the minutes a golden arrow, and the seconds is a double edged blade-propeller. Stainless steel, manual winding, and completely overhauled. $2495

Available from Derek at Watchestobuy.com here-->Link (part of his personal collection for fifteen years and just now for sale)

Slim sideviews

See also;
Math Watches Part 1.4593
Discs Instead of Hands
History of LED Calculator Watches
All Mystery Dial Posts
Collection of Gadget Watch Posts



Check out my $100-$100,000 holiday gift guide!-->LINK


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Newsflash! Time May Not Exist!

Not to mention the question of which way it goes...

by Tim Folger

"No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

So, is this guy wasting his Plancks?

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10^-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

Maybe this means we'll see an F.P. Journe Attoseconde or Jaeger LeCoultre Planckograph someday? That is, if days even exist...

via Horomundi
Full Article at DISCOVERY-->Link



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