Watch Wednesday Bonus Bit

I'm not posting a watch this week, but I thought I'd relate a bit of watch trivia. Several months back when I featured this Caravelle watch, I mentioned that I didn't know how to adjust the day of the week at the end of a month with less than 31 days.

These days it's fairly common for watches to have more than one "stop" or crown position: pulling the crown out to the first position lets you adjust the date or the day of the week (by turning the crown one way or the other), and pulling it out the rest of the way enables setting the time.

But back in the late 1960s when this watch was made, this sort of quick-set feature was typically found only on higher-end Swiss brands. If your watch had only the date function, then you turned the hands manually through the extra day (or three, in the case of the February-to-March transition) until the date changed to the 1st. (I once had an old Seiko that had an early variant of a quick-set function: to advance the date, you pushed in the crown, and the date changed with a heavy click. It was pretty cool.)

When a watch had day and date functions, it was a little trickier. By spending a little time fiddling around with this watch, I was able to figure out how it works. When you turn the hands past midnight both the day and date advance, but if you then turn the hands back a couple of hours there's a tiny click, and the day backs up but the date doesn't, so if you then turn the hands forward again, the date moves ahead an extra day. Simple and rather clever, but without an instruction booklet or a jewelry store employee to show you how it's done, it's not entirely obvious.