TICK TICK BOON

Whether your seconds hand ticks or sweeps says a lot about your watch... or does it?

- Richard Holt

A smoothly sweeping seconds hand is often used by a budding watch fancier as an indicator of quality. If you are close enough to tell the time, you can see whether the hand ticks once per second, or glides around majestically. But who made this the horological tyre kick of choice and does it have any merit?

Aesthetically the one-second tick is not ideal because the hand generally fails to meet up exactly with the markers on the dial. Some people might not care too much about this, but for those of a perfectionist leaning it can be quite annoying to see a precision instrument failing to hit its mark every single second, forever.