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Nonprofit preserving the art of watchmaking. Meet-ups, Watch Exchange, repairs & scholarships.

11/03/2026

Local spotlight: Speidel 📍 Providence

If your grandfather wore a stretchy steel watchband, there's a good chance it came from Providence. Speidel's American story starts in 1904, when brothers Albert, Edwin and Eugene Speidel arrived from Pforzheim, Germany. The company's first headquarters rose at 70 Ship Street, in what became the city's Jewelry District.

In 1959 Speidel introduced the Twist-O-Flex, a clasp-free expansion band you can literally twist inside out. It became one of the best-known watchbands in America, and it's still made today.

In 2023 Speidel opened its first flagship store and watch repair center in Wayland Square. Stop by for a band, an engraving or a repair, and wear a little Rhode Island watch history. 🛠️

📍 145 Wayland Ave, Providence, RI

📸 Product image courtesy of Speidel

11/02/2026

New release: Nomadic Dána 141 🖋️

Belfast independent Nomadic built its name on divers and GMTs. Its first dress watch borrows from somewhere unexpected: the city's old Harland & Wolff drawing offices, where draughtsmen turned shipbuilding ideas into plans. Dána is Irish for "bold," and 141 nods to the 1:1.41 proportions of A-series drawing paper, echoed in the dial.

• 28 x 39.5 mm 316L steel, just 8.3 mm thin
• Raised octagonal sapphire crystal
• Swiss LJP D101 hand-wound movement, 21,600 vph, 50-hour power reserve
• 30 m water resistance
• Emerald Green, Black Velvet or Moonlight White dials
• On sale since October 30

Flip it over and an oval window shows off the movement: a little shipyard grit on a watch made for the dinner jacket. Would you wear one?

📸 Images courtesy of Nomadic .watches

11/01/2026

Every mechanical watch has a heartbeat, and it comes from a coil thinner than a hair. ⚙️

The balance wheel swings back and forth, and the hairspring (or balance spring) pulls it back every time, like a tiny pendulum that works in any position. Together they set the pace for the whole movement.

Before it, pocket watches could drift badly over a single day. Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens noted his spiral-spring breakthrough on January 23, 1675, and Robert Hooke spent years insisting the idea was his first. Historians still debate the credit, but not the result: portable timekeeping went from novelty to genuinely useful.

Next time you hear your watch tick, thank a 350-year-old spring. 🕰️

📸 Portrait: Caspar Netscher, 1671 (public domain) · Balance wheel: Chris Burks via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

10/31/2026

Maker spotlight: Greubel Forsey 🌀

In 2004, Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey walked into Baselworld with something no one had seen before: the Double Tourbillon 30°. Two tourbillon cages, one inside the other, with the inner cage tilted at 30° and turning once a minute while the outer cage takes four.

The point wasn't spectacle. Tilting the regulator and spinning it on more than one axis averages out gravity in more positions, including the ones a watch actually sits in on your wrist.

Twenty-plus years later, their Atelier in La Chaux-de-Fonds has filed more than 70 patents and developed ten "Fundamental Inventions." Every piece is finished by hand, with hundreds of hours of bevelling and black polishing per watch. Their Hand Made 2 is built at just three pieces a year, using only hand-operated tools.

Their philosophy fits in two words: no concessions.

📸 Images courtesy of Greubel Forseyforsey

10/30/2026

What does "21 jewels" on a dial actually mean? 💎

Jewels are tiny bearings — usually synthetic ruby — that the pivots of the gear train turn in. Ruby is extremely hard and smooth, so it cuts friction and wear where steel pivots would otherwise grind away at brass.

The idea was patented in England in 1704 by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier with Peter and Jacob Debaufre. For two centuries, jewels were cut from natural stones: expensive and slow to work. That changed after Auguste Verneuil developed flame fusion in 1902, making synthetic ruby cheap.

So jewels aren't about value — they're about longevity. ⚙️

📸 Movement: Hustvedt via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Balance: Chris Burks via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

10/29/2026

New release: Urwerk UR-300 Time Quantum 🛰️

Announced October 15, Urwerk's latest takes a fresh run at its signature wandering hour. Four rotating, three-sided hour prisms ride on a T-shaped frame, and the current hour travels across a 0–60 minute scale spanning a 108° arc. At the top of every hour, the whole frame jumps and reconfigures in a single movement. Running seconds sweep across a 120° display.

• 45.2 × 58.8 × 18.25 mm Grade 5 titanium
• Two versions: bare titanium, or black AlTiN coating
• Calibre UR-30.01V automatic, 4 Hz, 44-hour power reserve
• 30 m water resistance
• 50 pieces total — 25 of each

Founded in Geneva in 1997 by watchmaker Felix Baumgartner and designer Martin Frei, Urwerk keeps proving there's more than one way to tell time.

📸 Images courtesy of URWERK

10/28/2026

In 1714, Britain offered a fortune to anyone who could find a ship's longitude at sea. Get it wrong and ships ran aground.

John Harrison, a carpenter turned self-taught clockmaker, bet his life's work that the answer was a timekeeper. His masterpiece, H4, finished in 1759, looked like an oversized pocket watch.

On November 18, 1761, H4 left Portsmouth aboard HMS Deptford in the care of Harrison's son, William. After 81 days at sea it reached Jamaica just 5 seconds slow — an error of about one nautical mile of longitude.

Even then, the Board of Longitude made Harrison fight for years to be paid. But every marine chronometer that followed owes something to that voyage. ⚓

📸 H4: Colonel Warden via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Portrait: Thomas King, Science Museum Group

10/27/2026

Local spotlight: Saltzman's Watches 📍 Cranston & Newport

The story starts in 1940, when Joseph Saltzman founded the Providence Watch Hospital. His son Richard took over in 1976, and in 2004 Richard reopened under the family name with his son, Evan — three generations of Rhode Island watch care.

Their Cranston flagship houses a showroom and an in-house workshop, and their Newport location at Hammett's Hotel takes walk-in service. They're an authorized dealer for brands including Oris, Longines, Hamilton, Tissot and TAG Heuer, and they handle everything from full overhauls to vintage restoration — plus mail-in repair from anywhere in the U.S.

If your watch needs some love, you don't have to ship it across the country. 🛠️

📍 1024 Reservoir Ave, Cranston, RI
📍 Hammett's Hotel, 4 Commercial Wharf, Newport, RI

10/26/2026

On June 26, 1801, Abraham-Louis Breguet was granted a French patent for "a new type of regulator": the tourbillon. 🌀

The problem: pocket watches spent their days upright in a vest pocket, so gravity pulled on the balance from the same direction, hour after hour, and introduced errors. Breguet's answer was to mount the entire escapement and balance in a rotating cage. Turn the whole assembly — typically once a minute — and those positional errors average out.

It was a masterpiece, and not a quick one. The first tourbillon watches sold about six years after the patent, and Breguet's workshop made just 40 of them between 1796 and 1829.

More than two centuries later, the tourbillon is still watchmaking's ultimate showpiece.

10/25/2026

New release: Ressence Type 10 DN "Dark Night" 🌑

Announced October 16, it's the first oil-filled Ressence with an in-house movement.

The upper display chamber holds 2.95 ml of silicone-based oil, which removes the air gap under the crystal — so the orbiting discs look like they're printed right on the surface, with no parallax. Hours, minutes and a 24-hour second time zone all live on rotating discs, and a colour-coded aperture shows the oil temperature. There's no crown: you wind and set it through the case back.

• 41.5 mm Grade 5 titanium with dark blue DLC — just 82 g
• In-house RW-04 automatic, twin barrels, 60-hour power reserve
• 50 m water resistance
• Limited to 100 pieces

Few brands rethink how we read time as completely as Ressence. Would you wear one?

Address

Newport, RI

Telephone

+14019467070

Website

https://rihoso.com/, https://rihoso.com/marketplace

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