How It All Started Part One: A Seiko 5

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

One of the staples of watch writing is the enthusiast’s origin story – the story of how a collector managed to get bitten by the watch bug. Everyone’s is slightly different but the general format is that you were inspired by a respected elder (how respected and how much an elder varies with the story) and ideally your first mechanical watch was something handed down to you. The romance of inheriting a watch, as well as the previous owner’s enthusiasm for watches and watch collecting, is very strong and often but not always that’s how people get started. I’m one of the exceptions to that rule. I do remember a couple of watches that my father owned – one of them a Benrus triple date, and unless it’s a false memory, he had an Accutron at one point but my parents split up when I was about seven, and although my father and I stayed in touch, I don’t remember any of the watches he owned after that.

The watch up top is one of the two first mechanical watches that I owned as an adult – I have a vague memory of owning a Timex as a kid, something roughly field watch-adjacent, but the details and the watch are long gone. I got the Seiko 5 nearly thirty years ago, when I was in graduate school, and my interest in mechanical watches had been stimulated by a purchase, somewhat at random, of a broken Waltham size 12 pocket watch at a flea market. I’d managed to repair the watch – it probably took six months to find tools and find both advice on how to proceed and time in which to do the work – and I wanted a mechanical wristwatch. This particular Seiko 5 was in a display at a long-gone and rather sketchy electronics shop on First Avenue just north of 14th Street, which had a motley collection of Seiko watches on display including this one (as well as an SKX007, but that’s another story). I think the watch cost around sixty dollars, which was quite a lot for me at the time but I was very proud of it and it made me feel, somewhat belatedly, rather grown up to wear it.

It is everything that made the Seiko 5 widely adopted as a first watch by watch enthusiasts, but a lot of the people who bought Seiko 5s in the 1990s and even into the early 2000s were, I suspect, simply people who needed a cheap, reasonably reliable watch and who either didn’t want to bother with battery replacement, or lived in parts of the world where finding someone who could replace a quartz watch battery might be a challenge. The first Seiko 5 was the 1963 Sportsmatic, and the 5 stands for the five key attributes of the line: automatic winding, day and date, recessed crown at 4:00, sturdy case and bracelet, and water resistance (there are other lists of these attributes, some of which include as one of the five, the Diashock antishock system). Mine has a solid caseback, Lumibrite hands and dots on the indexes and the hands and indexes are rather nice for such an inexpensive watch – steel with black inserts, and the lume application is quite clean. The lume still works just fine after thirty years (and of course who knows how long the watch was sitting on the rack next to the cash register before being sold). The case is rather elegant, all things considered – about 36mm x 12mm or so, as measured just now with my imprecise brass calipers, and with a beveled geometry slightly reminiscent of a Tissot PRX or hey, why not, a Vacheron 222.

The movement is the old reliable 7S26, with Seiko’s Magic Lever winding system. The 7S26 is not a piece of fine watchmaking but it had no aspirations to be fine (it’s long out of production). Instead, it aspired to be simple, tough, and reliable and mine has proven to be all those things. I haven’t worn the watch on a regular basis in probably more than 20 years, but when I picked it up to take a quick portrait for this story it started running immediately. I have had the back off a couple of times – once to regulate it (I think at its best it was running around seven or eight seconds fast per day which was good enough for me in the mid-1990s – probably good enough for me now, honestly) and once to see whether or not wearing it into the ocean at Coney Island was in fact a bad idea. There was a very small amount of rust around the crown tube, but that was about it. The watch has no depth rating, contenting itself with a simple “water resistant” stamp on the caseback so I don’t consider myself let down by the fact that some seawater might have gotten into it while I was swimming.

Pretty much the only example of somewhat sloppy QC is the glue showing around the date window. It probably came from the factory like that, unless the date window had fallen off at some point after the watch was assembled (likely in either Malaysia or Singapore) and an enterprising individual had glued it back into place. I will say that the bleeding glue, or lacquer or whatever it is, is basically invisible to the naked eye.

Seiko 5 watches in general are famous for their durability and this one certainly lived up to that reputation. I was not careful with it to put it mildly, and before it went into semi-retirement (giving way to an SKX007) it performed just fine, day in and day out, cheap and cheerful as they say – well, I don’t know if the watch was cheerful but I was. In a way, it makes me a little sad to look at it now. The complete satisfaction it provided as a daily wear watch gave way in a few years to a more or less constant dissatisfaction as I learned more and more about quote unquote fine watchmaking. Both the watch and I are quite a bit older of course, but the watch would probably be good for another 20 years if I had it serviced or even just found a drop-in replacement for the movement (I would keep the old one though, I’m sentimental that way).

I don’t know how many Seiko 5 watches have been made since 1963 but the number is very likely in the millions at this point. This one is probably the best example I own of the personal magic to be found in making a watch part of your daily life, and in how daily experience can take a mass-produced, mundane object and make it important. I didn’t set out deliberately to make it a touchstone for personal nostalgia, but gradually memories have accreted around it like nacre around an irritant in a pearl oyster – I was wearing it when my first son was born. In the words of the Rifleman’s Creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine.