The Story So Far: Ball Watches In 2020 And Beyond

roadwarrior

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July 22, 2020

https://www.ablogtowatch.com/story-so-far-ball-watches/

So, whatever happened to Ball Watch? Ten years ago, the Swiss brand was stoking a roaring fire with award-winning design and development talent, a rapidly growing dealer network, a highly active community fanbase on the forums, and an interesting team of ambassadors — all built around an extremely well-made product whose unique luminous capability and quality had few peers at the time. A subsequent switch to a focus on e-commerce might have put that meteoric rise on ice, but the brand recently seems to be once again finding its groove with a slew of interesting new watches, lots more activity on social media, and a resurgence in interest from the community. Longtime ABTW readers might have fond memories of the boldly sculpted Engineer Hydrocarbon or the vintage-inspired Skindiver watches, so if you’re just now being reintroduced to the brand, we thought we’d bring you up to speed on the “story so far.”

The Story So Far: Ball Watches In 2020 And Beyond Featured Articles

Ball’s origin story should be familiar to longtime forum regulars, but for those new here, the brand was originally born back in 1891 after the Great Kipton Train Wreck in northern Ohio, whose blame could be traced to a conductor’s watch that had stopped working. Following the accident, jeweler Webb C. Ball was appointed to investigate the cause and help develop a new set of national timekeeping regulations that would govern the performance of all watches being used in and around railroad operations. Known as “railroad time,” this new standard extended to a series of accurate and reliable watches certified by Ball that would be carried by the conductor, engineer, and firefighter of every train at the time, revolutionizing train safety and cementing the watchmaker’s legacy in horological history.

The Story So Far: Ball Watches In 2020 And Beyond Featured Articles

The Ball name wouldn’t always be associated with railroad time, though — particularly in the late fifties following the development of the “Underwater Society of America,” and the subsequent creation of its first purpose-built watch for sport diving: the Skindiver. The brand faded into obscurity around the quartz crisis but was revived in the early aughts using the same tenets established by Webb Ball himself: supreme accuracy and dependability in dynamic environments. However, there was a new wrinkle: The dial of every modern Ball watch would be fitted with tiny Swiss-made MB Microtec tritium gas tubes in lieu of luminous paint, yielding a constant, independent light source that didn’t need charging for up to 25 years, and an impressive degree of legibility even in total darkness. And though nearly every modern Ball watch maintains some classical railroad-themed connection, either in name or in passing reference by the signature “RR” seconds hand counterweight, the brand’s most distinctive models are a far cry from the pocket watches once carried by conductors, with their bold cases and dramatic light displays in each dial, through some very innovative and liberal applications of various shapes, sizes, and colors of tritium tubes.

The Story So Far: Ball Watches In 2020 And Beyond Featured Articles

Without getting too deep into the nitty-gritty on tritium tube composition and manufacture, each tube is coated with a specially colored phosphor powder, then filled with tritium gas (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen gas), and then laser-sealed, which locks the gas inside. When the phosphor is exposed to the electrons from the tritium gas, the phosphor is excited and emits a steady, colorful light for up to 25 years. Now, most standard tritium gas tubes fitted to pistol sights or set into the dial on any garden variety “tactical-style” watch are around a half-millimeter thick, and little more than a few millimeters long.

The Story So Far: Ball Watches In 2020 And Beyond Featured Articles

Ball’s earliest references, like the Inspector II, used tubes like these, but their designs quickly evolved into much more complex and innovative light displays, from the backlit Engineer Master II Moon Glow to the Engineer Master II Moon Phase, which used vertically oriented tube clusters to form its glowing yellow moon. Some later references like the long-running Fireman Night Train opted for sheer volume — with every hand, minute, and hour marker clearly delineated by its own tiny tritium tube, yielding a light show unrivaled at the time. But multiple decades of continually improved MB Microtec tritium technology has paved the way for an entirely new range of light displays — from the wider, flatter tubes deployed in the ultra-legible Engineer Master II Diver Chronometer, or the new Engineer Hydrocarbon Original whose cleverly hidden tritium “pads” have been sandwiched beneath its dial and sapphire glass bezel for a broad, flat light display not broken up by the tubes’ edges.

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https://www.ablogtowatch.com/story-so-far-ball-watches/
 
:thumb: for posting this one up, Mike.:hat:
 
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