AndCavanaugh
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Was the first American AHCI Candidate a Fraud?
He was passing off inexpensive Hangzhou movements as his own work. Identifying this movement wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Chascomm on the Watchuseek Chinese mechanical watches forum. Images are scarce this side of the great firewall, but searching "西湖 自动手表" on Baidu will bring up plenty in Xihu (Hangzhou's house brand) watches4 . The skeleton variant is even more obscure, though I managed to find one using Baidu reverse image search5 . To his credit, Phillips did add some "anglage" (and LE number) on the dial side.
This message has been edited by patrick_y on 2025-01-08 03:20:03
The movement is of domestic Chinese design, similar to the SN2 calibers made by Nanjing (and others), but much smaller. Hangzhou moonlit as an assembly house for Daini Seikosha's 7009A movements during the 80s (like Sellita was for ETA), which explains the magic lever winding system. Some more background from chinesewatchwiki.net, which also explains the caliber's strange proportions: "Meeting the challenge of a changing market in the 1980s, the [Hangzhou] factory introduced an automatic Xihu watch. This was a man-sized watch, but the movement was based on the small Xihu calibre with an enlarged main plate and a very simple auto-winding module with a large rotor."
Eternal Winding System
Phillips invented an Atmos-like automatic wristwatch wound by the contortions of a bimetallic spring in response to temperature change instead of by an oscillating weight. His Eternal Winding System (EWS) didn’t require a special movement either, it just replaced the rotor on a normal automatic movement. Some good pictures of it can be found here. JLC’s Atmos uses a chloroethane filled bellows with a diameter of 120mm, and, thanks to a hyper-efficient torsion pendulum, runs on only ~2.5e-7 watts of mechanical power6 . For comparison a fully wound ETA 2824-2’s barrel torque is ~12 Nmm, and the barrel rotates five times over 38 hours. 2pi * 5 turns * 0.012 Nm / 136800 s= 2.76e-6 watts.
His system would have to produce much more power than an Atmos, in a much, much smaller form factor. Others have poked enough holes in the idea already, so I'll leave it there. I'll also speak a little in his defense: I see no theoretical reason this couldn't work at a different scale, with a torsion pendulum clock and much, much, much larger bi-metallic spring. His US patent7 is expired if anyone wants to try making Atmos without the toxic, flammable gas.
References / sources not linked in situ:
- Two New ‘Candidates’ at the Acadamy, Europa Star, 2001 ↩︎
- Conversation with Mr. Phillips, WatchProSite.com , 2001 ↩︎
- Budapest Watch Company Website (Archived by WaybackMachine) ↩︎
- Image from 7788.com (Archived by Baidu) ↩︎
- Image from zhe2.com (Archived by Baidu) ↩︎
- JLC’s marketing material claims 60 million Atmos clocks use the same amount of energy as a 15-watt light bulb ↩︎
- US6457856B1
Moderator Edit: Link to original poster's website removed as per self promotion rule.
Was the first American AHCI Candidate a Fraud?
Steven Phillips (Istvan Fulop Hanzely) of Budapest Watch Company was a Hungarian born American master watchmaker and the first American candidate (not member) for AHCI membership 1 . Phillips claimed to design and build his watches from scratch, except fo...
He was a forerunner
Outsourcing movements and selling them as his own production. Still trying to figure out how the eternal movement works. Once again, thank you for your article. Can I suggest you to write us your point of view of the detent escapement on a dedicated discu...
Thanks for reading, I don't think he would have gotten away with it today.
Basically, he replaced the rotor with a roast thermometer. The bi-metallic spring would need to be enormous to power a wristwatch from just ambient temperature changes. Important to note its not a heat powered watch, like a Seiko Thermic, those use the Se...
Ok, I got it
The eternal movement is something that could be tried by Ressence, HYT or any other independent, using the Atmos' principle. There are plenty of liquids/solutions with low boiling point, the main challenge (and many more) is to seal the fluid circuit, but...
This is original research on my part, if anyone knew he was lying about his movements, they kept quiet
Maybe the AHCI figured it out too, but until now the consensus was mostly "innovator"
This is sad to see. Clearly there was fraud at play.
I don’t know about his EWS and if it ever actually worked as claimed, but from the rip off skeletonized watch pretending to be something special at a ridiculous price back then, I can only deduce that this guy was a conman! IMO the AHCI should have distan...
