Item the first: Thanks to COVID I recently enjoyed about the nerdiest YouTube video ever -- an 18-minute presentation about why Timex wrist watches are considered neither valuable nor collectable by watch experts. You would think such arcana would be boring, especially to people with only the mildest interest in watches. Like me. And you’d be right. But in addition to motorcycles and riding, I am also interested in the relationship between culture and technology, and this Timex watch video is all about that.
Since it has nothing to do with motorcycles directly, I sort of hesitate to recommend it, but because so many are more-or-less locked down, and since wristwatches are, like motorcycles, examples of a mechanically engineered technology, here it is. Warning. It’s boring and nerdy. Prepare to be geeked out:
Spoiler and executive summary – The reason Timex watches are not collectable isn’t because they are inexpensive and common. Lots of people happily collect things which are neither rare nor valuable. Collecting, sorting and categorizing things is partly human nature. No, these watches are not being collected (according to this video’s narrator) because they were never intended to be repaired or rebuilt after the inside mechanism wears out. They were made to keep pretty good time until they died and then you were supposed to go out buy another one.
Yet lots of other avidly collected products are exactly like that. Vintage Levi’s denim pants are collectably valuable. Old worn out hand tools are collectable. View an episode of ‘Antiques Roadshow’ (or any of television’s syndicated riffs on this formula) and you’ll see plenty of other examples. It’s unbelievable what kinds of things have a collectable value.
The reason this Timex wristwatch video is part of a motorcycle blog is because it caused me to think about old motorcycles, and my irrational emotional attachments to my own stuff. Especially to things which embody mechanical and digital technologies. For example, I’ve always written, read and surfed the internet using a notebook computer. I get between four and six years of use from these machines and after they become worn and obsolete, I replace them. But there are now five of these old notebook computers stacked on a bookshelf here going back to one from 1992. Hard to believe the first one cost $2,300 and featured a gigantic 33mb of memory, while the notebook purchased six months ago, and which I’m typing this on right now, cost almost the exact same amount in non-inflation-adjusted dollars, and it has 2TB of memory. I never loved these computers, so why did I keep them?
It can be difficult to understand why some no-longer-made bikes are so well thought of, and others (like old Timex watches) are not. The difference doesn’t seem to correlate with any objective machine-itself thing. Racing accomplishments? Sales popularity? Aesthetic beauty? Sometimes a bike which was successful by more than one of these measures still becomes forgotten. Compare the wonderful and historically important Honda Cub and Vespa scooter with the equally brilliant ‘Bee’. All three were created to be small utility-oriented personal mobility products at about the same time. And all three are recognized as truly great designs, but only two are well remembered today. Again, why?
The virtue or divinity of any particular motorcycle (and many other engineered artifacts) may lie partly in the intentions of the engineers and designers who created it. If the device was intended to be ‘forever’ in some functional way so it’s user could in theory employ it for the rest of their life should they stubbornly choose to, maybe that is an important intangible ingredient. I’m thinking not just motorcycles and wristwatches, but also about Stonehenge and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Consider a now-ancient BSA 441 Victor motorcycle, known by old guys world-wide as the ‘Victim’. Light, spare, elemental and pretty -- but what a piece of crap to own, ride and maintain. Yet just like the Honda Cub and Vespa, they’ve became beloved and iconic. These three very different bikes are easy on the eyes and straightforward enough in design and engineering so almost any rider can see (and in their minds eye, accurately imagine) how to take them completely apart and then more-or-less completely reassemble them using little more than a few simple hand tools.
My own vehicular example of this kind of quasi-timeless ingenuity is an old 4x4 car. I purchased it brand new forty-seven short years ago and still enjoy looking at, driving, maintaining and fixing it. But dang if I can explain why. (With benefit of age, wisdom and hindsight maybe I was subconsciously thinking of it as a brutalist rebuke and an aesthetic critique of the popular pimped-out overly chromed cars coming out of Detroit at that time?) Before I’d driven it 100 miles, I knew it was crap, but this did not stop me from falling in love with it and driving, repairing and maintaining it as my (very slow) ‘daily-driver’ whenever I was not going to be riding or walking somewhere. Funny thing is, it’s now gone over 105,000 miles and with the further benefit of hindsight my stubborn commitment to it probably is partially due as much to its flaws as its virtues. Today this no-longer-produced model (after a run of more than sixty years…) has strangely become an aspirational and iconic fashion accessory for millennial hipsters, though not because it represents a brutalist rejection of mass-produced cars-in-general, but because it visually looks relatively timeless in sort of doomsday-prepper way. And just for the record, most motorcycles also provide this same sort of brutalist rebuke of the universality of automobiles, if one chooses to overly intellectualize about them.
Which brings this back to old Timex wristwatches. The only thing my high-tech modern motorcycle and low-tech old 4x4 car have in common is how both can be nearly infinitely rebuilt. Whenever the makers of our machines attempt to create something which potentially could (with care) have a life-long relationship with its user, they achieve a special kind of immortality. Just like Stonehenge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Mona Lisa, and even an ordinary 10,000-year-old flint knapped knife blade. Those Timex people were not going for that, while the crappy old 4x4 car, the wonderful Honda Cub and Vespa and lousy BSA 441 people apparently were. One cannot help but fall in love with such vainglorious embodiments of engineering (and artistic) idealism.
At this point any half-assed amateur philosopher might continue by making a pretty good argument about how a disposable Timex has more in common with a banana than those great watches admired by wristwatch nerds. Not me. There are too many other things to do.
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Item the second: If you can make it past the first five or ten semi-awkward minutes, this thirty-five-minute interview with nerdy engineer/futurist Sandy Monroe is pretty fun.
Mr. Monroe first came to my awareness a few years ago when he made some videos promoting his engineering-and-testing-for-hire company. They do stuff like taking apart and analyzing electric cars and their batteries to see how they work. I’m not a subscriber to his channel, though. It’s been a few years since the last time I watched one of his YouTube videos. Until this one, just now.
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Item the third: Before writing this blog essay I sent both of these links to about ten friends, the first one by ‘cc’ a few weeks ago and this second one earlier today by ‘bcc’ to nearly the same group. These days many people prefer to not have their email address available to unknown persons, and some of my friends don’t know each other.
Nowadays fewer people share links-in-general with their like-minded friends, at least compared to how internet and email cultures were ten or fifteen years ago. This change makes me feel like such a clueless geezer. I don’t know why email forwarding-and-sharing activity changed, but I sense it’s a loss.
Decades ago, my mother and her siblings would snail-mail mail each other clippings from newspapers and magazines, and later photocopies of stories they’d read and enjoyed (or found interesting in some way). There would sometimes be a follow-up face-to-face or telephone conversation about the shared story. I remember rolling my eyes when an envelope containing a few clippings from my mother would arrive, but I’d always give her a call and thank her for sending them, and sometimes a clipping-topical conversation would follow.
Why has this kind of social practice, which was such a large part of early emails, declined? Too much spam? Facebook? Twitter? Other social media? Social media is probably part of the reason, but regardless, I’m not too excited with the depth of intermediation and content tracking which are an integral element of today's popular social media forms.
Relative to the first part, my wife and I were exploring through Vermont ski resorts (I know, summer…sigh) and we came across this old motorcycle sitting in a parking lot. It looked like it had been there some time…the seat had faded to a creamy white, the rear tire was flat, it looked like it hadn’t been moved this year.
The thing that drew my attention was that I had never seen a bike like this. It looked like a frankenstein mixing of various makes, the standout thing being a boxer type motor and yet the brake pads said Honda, and it had a weird bannanna seat. Did some research when I got home and it turns out to be a Marusho Lialac, a relatively rare Japanese bike from the 60s.
I have my ride, don’t need more, and certainly don’t want to spend time effort and money fixing up a white elephant, but the first thing I thought was this bike deserves to be treated like a princess, and idly I wondered how I would find out the owner of a semi-abandoned motorcycle in a ski resort parking lot (second thought was, sadly, that it was likely the owner passed away and either the bike will be stolen or it will rot away until someone drops it at a junkyard).
I think part of the restoration of old items is proxy immortality; there is something so satisfying about taking something old, damaged, even nonfunctional, and fixing it, beautifying it. If we could do the same with our own bodies, it could extend our own “glory days” of youth…to the point where the trappings of our past have less value. As is, I am surrounded with artifacts from my youth to my grandfathers’ youth. Everything is a monument to history and a personal connection to time and family.
What was the 4X4 car – just curious
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