Invicta Lupah

Invicta Lupah watches, as do all watches, have a great history of development and innovation. This site will concentrate on the fine Invicta Lupah collections but first I think it only just to write and inform you a little about the development and how the wrist watch functions to give you some idea what lies behind your time piece and maybe make you appreciate your wrist watch even more.

Invicta Lupah

Invicta Lupah.com

The movement in the invicta lupah wrist watch is the equivalent of the heart to the human being. The movement measures the passing of time and displays the current time. Movements can be either entirely mechanical, entirely electronic or in some cases a combination of the two.

Mechanical movements were the pride and joy of all skilled watch makers. They are however costly to produce and require regular maintenance and nowadays are only found in prestige watches which reflect the amount of work to build them in their price.

Electronic movements on the other hand have very few or even no moving parts. They use the piezoelectric effect in a tiny quartz crystal. The crystal forms a quartz oscillator that is used to pace a timekeeping mechanism accurately. Most electronic watches are called quartz watches, such as the Invicta Lupah watch, and have this quartz movement which are geared to drive the hands on the watch face. The first quartz watch to be produced was the Seiko 35 SQ in 1969 and nowadays quartz movements are mass produced because of their simplicity, their cost and their ability to be extremely accurate.All of the Invicta Lupah collection have Swiss quartz.

Each Invicta Lupah watch needs a power source in order to function. Traditional mechanical watch movements use a mainspring as their power source. The mainspring must be rewound every time the watch stops and this is done by the user and as most of the watches designed these days are designed to run for approximately 40 hours each winding, its best to wind your watch every day. There are of course self winding watches out there on the market which wind themselves with a winding rotor which rotates with the movement of the wearer’s wrist. John Harwood, a British watch repairer invented the first self winding wrist watch in 1923. Electronic watches need electricity for a power source, hence the replaceable watch battery. These batteries are very small and give tiny amounts of power continuously for up to a couple of years in the Invicta Lupah watches. To change them when they run out is probably done best at a watch repairer or someone as equally skilled particularly if the watch you own is water resistant and you wish it to remain so. The batteries these days for watches tend to be either lithium or silver oxide. Cheaper batteries with a lesser life span tend to be alkaline but buying those tends to be a false economy.

So now we shall give you a little concise history beginning in the 16th century of how today’s wrist watch evolved. Made in Europe during the 16th century timepieces of a size between a clock and watch were the first to be worn, to be worn we do not mean on the wrist like the Invicta Lupah They were either worn on a chain that was hanging from the neck or were fastened on to pieces of clothing. They were rather heavy cylinder type boxes which were engraved and ornamented to add decoration to ones clothing. In those days they didn’t have the hour, minute and second hands that we have today. They made do with just an hour hand and this hour hand and face were not covered with glass for protection but that of a hinged brass cover. So in order to tell the time the owner had to open the brass covering unless it was a higher class of watch where the brass covering was pierced with grillwork so the owner could see the time without opening the cover. The movements in those days were made from iron or steel and held together with pins. It was not until after 1550 that screws were invented and then used in the movements of clocks. But the actual thing about these first worn watches was that they were useless as watches and lost time greatly so actually the more you think about it the more you realise that they were not actually used as watches but more as a fashion accessory. And if you investigate more you discover that later on in the century these watches were made of shapes such as animals, flowers and crosses which gives more credence to them actually been made as jewellery and fashion items rather than watches like the Invicta Lupah.

As times changed so did tastes. The King of England Charles ll in 1675 introduced waistcoats in to men’s fashion. These waistcoats of course had pockets and it was no longer viable or fashionable to have large heavy cylinder object watches hanging from your neck. So the logical progression was for the watch to become smaller and made to fit the pockets of these waistcoats. And indeed they did. The pocket watch became more rounded and flatter with no sharp sides or edges. Glass was first used to cover the face of a watch around the year 1610. Again though these watches were not good time keepers due to a problem called isochronism which was the watches slowing down greatly as their mainspring ran down.

So you can see a pattern emerging here. Watches were constantly being improved in appearance and size but no matter they still remained very bad time keepers unlike the present day Invicta Lupah watches. So the obvious next step forward was to increase the reliability of the time pieces and in the years between 1650 and 1765 an awful lot of inventions and improvements were made. In 1657 the balance spring was invented and added to the balance wheel in the workings of the watch. The effect of this balance spring made the balance wheel a harmonic oscillator which was resistant to disturbances. The improvement from this addition to the watch was dramatic improving some watches accuracy by up to a couple of hours in a day. Because of this dramatic improvement a minute hand began to appear on the watch around about 1700 in France. Watch makers took note of the dramatic improvement in watches due to the addition of the balance wheel and strove for even greater improvements. Thomas Tompion in 1695 invented the cylinder escapement which replaced the verge escapement and in England quality watches began to even use the duplex escapement which was invented by Jean Baptiste in 1724.

In 1765 Pierre Le Roy came out with his temperature compensated balance wheel. Now the thing is and what took so many years to discover was the fact that balance wheel time pieces were subject to temperature changes. The elasticity of the balance spring changed in temperature changes thus knocking everything out of sync and making the watch lose time at great rates. This compensated balance wheel was worked on and improved by Thomas Earnshaw resulting in watches becoming even more so accurate just as the Invicta Lupah watch is these days.

In Britain from 1800, the lever escapement invented by Thomas Mudge in 1759,came in to significant use. It is debated if this was not one of the most significant improvements to occur to the watch. And by 1900 the lever escapement was used in almost every new watch made. The great advantage of the lever escapement was that it allowed the balance wheel to swing completely free throughout it’s cycle and due to locking and draw its action it was very precise and watches could now be called accurate as we do call them today.

During the 20th century designs in the workings of the watch became standard and watch makers turned to back to improving designs and production methods. Better materials were used and tighter tolerances were made and the actual production of the watch was improved to make watch making a more viable commercial operation. At the beginning of the century wrist watches were mainly worn by women and not men but during the first world war soldiers were issued with wrist watches which enabled them to tell the time whilst they were using their hands to carry equipment or munitions.

1969 was the year that wrist watches took off however. It was the introduction of the quartz watch that fired this. A quartz crystal resonater replaced the traditional balance wheel and was driven by by a battery powered oscillator circuit. All Invicta Lupah watches are quartz. The thing with the quartz watch was that it was even more accurate, even in great temperature changes and also the quartz watch eliminated the need for so many working parts of which these working parts needed to be cleaned and were not as shock resistant as the quartz watch.

So there you are. Just a small concise history of how the wrist watch was improved and evolved over a few hundred years. As you can see there have been many innovations and new inventions bringing us to the modern day wrist watch just like the Invicta Lupah watch.

The problem with mechanical movement watches is that they are sensitive to position and temperature and are less accurate than electronic watches. And because of all the small parts in the movement they can break and need repair.

A mechanical movement uses an escapement mechanism to control the unwinding of the spring. The balance wheel combined with the balance spring controls the gear system of the watch just like that of a pendulum clock.