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Digital division
BBC Top Gear UK
|July 2025
From cheap and cheerful to pricey and posh – the digital watch is enjoying a bit of a comeback
WHAT IS A DIGITAL WATCH? CLOSE your eyes and imagine one, and it's most likely something cheapish and battery powered. It is the watch equivalent of a Prius – you buy it for the job it does, not because you love it. But there is much more to digital than that.
Back in the 1880s, a man called Josef Pallweber patented a jumping hour mechanism. Instead of the analogue display of hands pointing to numbers, the hours appeared in a window, thanks to a little rotating wheel behind the dial. This was the world's first digital movement and was put into production in pocket watches made by IWC and others.
This story is from the July 2025 edition of BBC Top Gear UK.
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