Just bought a new cheap drugstore digital watch, and I’m wondering why it has a rotatable compass ring (google-fu says that’s called a bezel). I know about the trick of using the sun and analog watch hands to find compass directions, but that wouldn’t seem applicable to a digital watch. What for?
Aesthetics. Expensive watches have it, so cheap watches are going to mimic the style.
I suppose on a pricier digital watch, the function selector might be disguised as a rotating bezel, but on a cheapo, what Bear said.
I once had a digital watch with a digital compass built in. I could push a little button to get a directional bearing. It had a compass ring to calibrate it. Does your watch do anything like this?
Many years ago, I saw a watch that had the 24 time zones on a bezel, so you could easily remind yourself of local time vs. home time. It was cuter’n anything, and seems totally unavailable these days. (Bummer. I wants one!)
Maybe if you twist it just right, it pops off and spools out a strangling wire. I saw it in a documentaryonce.
You don’t have an hour hand, but you can probably deduce where the hour hand would be pointing if you had one, yes? That and some way to measure the angle is all you need to do the watch compass trick, so a digital watch with compass bezel works fine.
ETA: Actually now that I think about it, the bezel would be kinda redundant on an analog watch because you can measure the angle with the markings on the face, but the only way you can do the trick (precisely) on a digital watch is if it has a bezel.
Out of the blue it hits me: there is a way to use the compass ring to find directions. The key is that the bezel has a clicking mechanism so it turns in discrete jumps- 60 for a full circle.
Let’s start with an idealized example: it’s an equinox day, so the sun will rise pretty close to due east at 6:00 AM, will be due south at 12 noon, and will set due west at 6:00 pm. There’s a fixed reference arrow on the watch. Turn the bezel ring until S is lined up with the arrow; pointing the reference arrow at the sun will give accurate directions at 12 noon.
Over the course of six hours the sun will move from due south to due west, a 1/4 rotation of a compass. Turning the bezel ring 15 clicks will give it 1/4 rotation. . So each click is 1/15 of six hours, or 24 minutes, or five clicks for every two hours. So use the time to figure out how many clicks past noon it is, and the compass directions will be (approximately) accurate. For the morning, start with N at the reference arrow and advance how many clicks past midnight. (Allowing for daylight savings time, time zone noon vs. solar noon at your longitude, etc.)
You don’t need an actual analog watch with hands. You just have to be able to picture an analog watch and know what a watch looks like at that time. I teach my students that they can do all that survival stuff with their cell phone as long as they can picture the time on an analog.
Designer-ish watch designs aren’t generally about practicality. As indicated, they are for style and even the cheap ones start to mimic the really expensive ones. By expensive, I mean the ones that make a Rolex seem like a dollar store bargain. Truly expensive watches are all about hand-built “complications”. That can be anything from tracking multiple time-zones to celestial cycles using tiny, hand-made components. They are really just small analog computers that serve no purpose other than bragging rights but there is a small but thriving market for them.
Here is a rather basic Patek Philippe that you can get for uner $700,000 if you bargain hard.
However, if you are a real watch enthusiastic, you probably want something like this that has a record-breaking 57 complications including eight Hebrew calendar functions plus many of the astronomical functions that go well beyond the plebeian riffraff. It is a relative bargain estimated in the $5 million range but likely to appreciate with time (no pun intended).
Enjoy your spin dial on the face. For only $5 million more, you could have the capability of having one that plays the Westminster (Big Ben) chimes on schedule or telling you what the current time is in Beijing and the Zodiac sign.
Rotating watch bezels aren’t usually about direction. They’re for things like time offsets for navigation and rally stage timing.
You can use it to remember the value,
whether its the seconds after the minute,
or the minutes after the hour…
or the hour…
you can set it when you learn it and look at it later on to help verify your memory.
I had to look up tourbillon.