{"id":421280,"date":"2025-11-04T11:24:41","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T11:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/article.php?article_id=2177624"},"modified":"2025-11-04T11:24:41","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T11:24:41","slug":"off-topic-dr-robert-graves-and-the-second-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/off-topic-dr-robert-graves-and-the-second-hand\/","title":{"rendered":"Off Topic: Dr Robert Graves and the second hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

When time grew close, I discovered time. Which is to say, I guess, that I emerged from the first lockdown tending a new fascination with mechanical wristwatches. It’s shameful in a way – wrongly, I had always associated watches and the people who love them with a certain kind of sneering conservatism. Watches the size of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups glinting and twitching on huge wrists. But I had read an essay by William Gibson about his own discovery of watches at the same time that he discovered very early eBay back in the nineties. I was hooked by the magic of the watch word horde: escapement, movement, complication. I was hooked too by something he refers to as the “Tamagotchi gesture”. This is the fact that a mechanical watch needs its owner. It needs caring – to wind, to reset the time, to spin the day date window through its lazy cycles.<\/p>\n

Something else. I was fascinated by what Gibson refers to as a “medical chapter ring”. This is a border around the watch face on certain watches, marked with indents that allow a person to keep track of a pulse – their own or someone else’s. Around the time I learned about this I was becoming interested with a nineteenth century physician named Dr Robert Graves. Graves was the first to describe Grave’s disease, an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid. He was a friend of Turner and once saved a bunch of people on a sinking ship by fixing the pumps using leather from his shoes. Oh yes, and you know the second hand on a watch? The rumour is that he invented it.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When time grew close, I discovered time. Which is to say, I guess, that I emerged from the first lockdown tending a new fascination with mechanical wristwatches. It’s shameful in a way – wrongly, I had always associated watches and the people who love them with a certain kind of sneering conservatism. Watches the size of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups glinting and twitching on huge wrists. But I had read an essay by William Gibson about his own discovery of watches at the same time that he discovered very early eBay back in the nineties. I was hooked by the magic of the watch word horde: escapement, movement, complication. I was hooked too by something he refers to as the “Tamagotchi gesture”. This is the…<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":421281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[230],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-eurogamer"],"yoast_head":"\nOff Topic: Dr Robert Graves and the second hand | Arcader News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When time grew close, I discovered time. 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