Review: IWC Ingenieur IW3817

For a brief period in 2017, IWC released to the world a collection of 100 watches designated the IW3817, part of a not-so-broad collection featuring the calibre 89800. Technically—and as we all know, technically right is the best kind of right—it’s a digital smart watch, one most people had no idea IWC ever made. Well they did, and it’s here, and we’re going to find out just how smart it actually is.

Understanding the origins of smartness could well be a painful task, meaning here in the sense of being painfully boring, but the sense of enduring agony actually lends itself a clue to the very first meaning of the word. Since the times of Ye Olde English—that’s a real period of history, look it up—smart was simply used to describe a sharp, superficial pain, as in, “Ooh! That smarts.”

It’s the immediacy of a kind of pain that can be described as smart that gave way to the common vernacular of today, transitioning through a meaning of keenness, sharp thinking, the reaction of thought that is as immediate as the pain afflicted to cause one to yell out and suck air between their teeth. Like a head connecting with the corner of an open cupboard, or a pinkie toe with the edge of the bed, an idea comes to a smart person with the same flourish and snap as expletives leaking from the aforementioned victim.

Speaking of etymology—and I thought this was too interesting to leave out, so please indulge—the “wise” in clockwise draws its source from the meaning, “way” or “manner”, which has come to also have meaning in the context of someone who’s advice you should probably listen. For example, “knowing the way” or “guiding the way”. See, I’m not just an incredibly handsome face that you can’t see after all.

“Digital” undergoes a similar metamorphosis, and despite its sudden rise in popularity in the 1950s as the development of such technology that would eventually find itself in watches such as the Pulsar LED began, its genesis can also be traced back way, way into past. Not so far back as when the first F-91W entered our Earth’s atmosphere contained inside the shell of a hundred-million-year-old meteorite, only to later be discovered in the early 90s by the Casio corporation, but still pretty far back as far as language is concerned: to an era where Latin wasn’t a language that determined how expensive your school is.

IWC was founded in 1868 by Florentine Ariosto Jones

Where “analogue” derives its meaning from ancient Greek to mean proportionate, for example a hand showing a reading proportionately between two markers, “digital” is less indistinct. Ten fingers, ten toes, no more no less, the number of digits the average human finds themselves born with. In fact, digital was originally allocated to any whole number less than ten, presumably in reference to holding up your hands and saying, “This many, please.” All it took from there was the definition of a system whereby numbers of fingers could be represented in written form: i.e. numerical digits.

That distinction between certainty and uncertainty between digital and analogue found its true calling at the dawn of computing, where engineers sought to describe the language with which they communicated with their machines. In basic terms, you couldn’t say to a computer, “About this much”, or “Something like this”—it was important, imperative even, to be definitive. Yes or no. One or zero. On or off.

But that distinction branched simultaneously into a similar yet different direction with the same advent of computing, but here—and this is what we’re most interested in—regarding the display. Reading an analogue clock is at best a highly accurate guess involving degrees of mental interpolation, whereas a digital display represents an exact readout. You look at your F-91W and it doesn’t let you know what the time is roughly—it is exact, precise, with no ambiguity, exactly like it’s Alpha Centauri—I mean Japanese—origins.

So, a digital smart watch is one that’s technically both quick-thinking and tells you how it is without ambiguity. Today, we’re used to blinking lights and touchable screens and whizzbang doodahs, but the smartness of a watch doesn’t necessarily rely on bits and bytes to do its thing.

The IWC Ingenieur IW3817 was first introduced in 2017

Although it may seem otherwise, a modern computer is still inherently a stupid object. Regardless of the many millions of decisions a high-powered computer makes, it is still at its core driven by tangible directives and definable rules, far from the self-evolving technological nightmare that is the singularity.

Writing software, therefore, is rather complicatedly outlining sets of conditions to define a computer’s reactions, creating paths of logic that will draw a conclusion from an input to an output. That conclusion may have run through many, many decisions, but ultimately the basic principle remains true.

You don’t need the silicon transistors of a CPU to be able to build a system of logic like this, and before computers were a thing, mechanical complications were the given approach. In fact, it’s not a binary situation; the very first computers were mechanical, built like enormous watch mechanisms to process data.

And something that’s incredibly important—and the source of many bugs like Y2K—is a computer’s ability to precisely monitor the time and date, and for it to do that it needs to be built with a system of processes that allow it to know what to do and when. A computer has a Real Time Clock; a movement has the escapement, and they are the foundation on which all the proceeding decisions are made.

The IWC Ingenieur IW3817 at its time of release was limited to just 100 pieces

With a computer and its software interface, the clock can be quite simple asked, “Have sixty seconds elapsed?” and it will know to record that as a minute. The same with hours, days, months, years, leap years—all the mathematics can be laid out in logic form to log the passage of time. For a movement such as the calibre 89800, those questions can only be asked mechanically.

The easiest way to get about the problem, for time at least, is by having a system that’s not self-aware. Given the right dimensions and solid accuracy from the movement, the hands for the hours and minutes can cycle the dial with the movement itself being none the wiser on anything beyond the seconds. The hands go around in perpetuity, with the reader deducing from the display what time it equates to.

That’s all very well and good until it comes to the date, because the date can’t simply go around in circles. Some months have thirty days, some thirty-one, with February being especially tricky with twenty-eight and every four years, twenty-nine. A four-year correction known as the leap year is to blame there, adjusting for the less than perfect system that is our planet’s orbit around the sun, which cannot be divided into whole days.

So how do you mechanically code this information into a movement? Well, for IWC it’s through a component called—rather handily for this particular analogy—the program wheel. It’s a completely different way of thinking, taking a string of data commands and building them as a physical representation. The program wheel is actually rather simple, featuring forty-eight teeth, one for each month of the four-year leap cycle. Each tooth differs in length dependent on the number of days in that month, with most of the teeth duplicated across each quarter. The tooth that represents February is the same for three of the four, with the fourth a little longer for the leap year.

By mechanically limiting the reach of the date changing mechanism, the movement can “know” which months to skip and by how much. Add to that a digital readout for both the date and the month, and what do you know? You’ve got yourself a ye olde smartwatch.

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