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How many hands does a watch actually need? The question may seem trivial at first glance, but the answers watchmakers give with their products are surprisingly diverse. We took a look through the collections of several renowned watch brands to find out.
What hour has struck?
Whether on a wristwatch, a smartphone or a wall clock – being able to check the current time in almost any situation is something we take entirely for granted today. Yet well into the modern era, things were completely different. For many centuries, people relied on the position of the sun to orient themselves in time. And for measuring time during the day, the sundial long remained the most accurate instrument available. Only with the invention of mechanical wheel clocks did it become possible to measure time independently of sunshine.
However, the first mechanical timekeepers were so imprecise that they had to be reset regularly – using a sundial, of all things. As a result, it was initially neither possible nor sensible to fit mechanical clocks with more than one hand. Single-hand clocks – on tower clocks often combined with a bell – were perfectly adequate for knowing what hour had struck.
To this day, you can still find timepieces here and there on the towers or facades of churches, town halls and other historic buildings that show only the hour.
Some of these dials, however, also feature additional divisions into half hours or quarter hours. It would take until the end of the 17th century before wheel clocks ran precisely enough to be fitted with a minute hand.
Two, three, many hands...
As accuracy improved, clockmakers eventually began equipping timepieces not only with a minute hand but also with a seconds hand. And with the introduction of further complications and subdials, the number of hands that can appear on a single dial grew even more. Some of them are used for timing, as on chronographs; others display a second time zone, the date or the power reserve. Since the 1990s, however, single-hand watches have made a comeback – this time as wristwatches.
Designer Klaus Botta is regarded as the pioneer of this trend; he was already working on wristwatches with just a single hand in the mid-1980s. Since then, several manufacturers have launched such models, some dispensing with any dial divisions at all, others using quarter-hour or five-minute markings. Some models are designed so that the hand moves twice as fast as usual, completing a full turn of the dial in just six hours. Others run at half the normal speed, so that one full rotation of the hand takes 24 hours.
Alongside a number of watchmakers that produce exclusively or predominantly single-hand watches, there are also luxury watch brands such as Mühle-Glashütte whose collection includes just one example of this kind. Mühle's M 29 Einzeiger takes its design cues from historic instruments and features not one but two scales on its dial. While the inner scale is divided into quarter-hour increments, the outer one is divided into ten-minute steps with two-minute subdivisions.
Women's watches and dress watches with two hands
Today, two-hand watches are found above all among women's watches. They are also present in the men's segment, especially among deliberately understated and elegant dress watches. One of the most famous two-hand women's models is likely Breguet's Reine de Naples.
But an Omega Constellation Brushed Quartz Mini or a Tissot T-Lady Generosi T also make do with just two hands. In general, the seconds hand is omitted mainly on women's models with a particularly small case and dial diameter, where reading the time to the second would be difficult anyway.
Overall, however, two-hand watches have lost ground over the past decades in terms of units sold.
Three-hand watches – the widespread standard
Most wristwatches today are probably three-hand models, for both women and men. Luxury classics such as the Rolex Datejust, the Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra or the TAG Heuer Carrera belong to this category, as do modern designer models from Nomos Glashütte or Junghans.
Numerous dive watches are also designed as three-hand watches, such as the legendary Rolex Submariner, Omega's Planet Ocean or TAG Heuer's Aquaracer. Sinn's mission timers likewise include several three-hand models.
Watches with four or more hands
A common variation on the three-hand watch is the four-hand model, with each hand serving a different function. One of the most common versions is the so-called GMT watch, such as TAG Heuer's Carrera Twin Time or Omega's Seamaster Aqua Terra GMT, which can display the time in a second time zone alongside the current local time.
Other options include a pointer date or a power reserve indicator, although these are usually placed not centrally but separately on the dial.
Particularly common and popular multi-hand timepieces, however, are chronographs, which are enjoying ever-growing popularity, especially among men's watches.
Omega's Speedmaster and Breitling's legendary pilot's chronographs are especially well-known examples, but by now almost every luxury watchmaker has one or more chronograph models in its collection.
