Secs Machine: A Review of the Edge Company's Machine Watch III

As the very greenest of watch newbies, I haven’t until now even felt a desire to attempt a review, knowing that most of my opinions in this field are liable to be uninformed and half-baked at best. But I’m well enough qualified to identify genuine badness when I encounter it, which makes the Machine Watch a perfect first review.

This thing found me on eBay; perhaps you’ve had the same experience. As far as I recall, just about as soon as I started browsing watches, the site started nudging the Machine Watch in my direction. It is obvious that the seller is, somehow, in possession of quite a trove of new old stock—willing, even,  to negotiate bulk pricing upon request! It didn’t take me long to resign myself to the inevitability of forking over the $37 in exchange for the questionable satisfaction of learning exactly how bad the watch could be.

Reliable information on the watch is nearly impossible to come by, its exact origins having been lost to the ages. The eBay listing declares it to be a “1992 New Edge Co Piston Machine III Futuristic Wrist Watch,” but in the “item specifics” section only narrows the “year of manufacture” down to 1990-1999. Given that the watch’s cardboard outer packaging is printed with a URL, I immediately found the 1992 claim to be highly improbable; indeed, further sleuthing hasn’t shown the URL itself (edgeco.com, now defunct) to have existed prior to 2002. Which squares with a 2009 forum post by someone who remembered buying one of these “about 6 or 7 years ago.”

This is where the history, so far as I can reconstruct it, gets a little weird. The logo on the packaging indicates that this watch was sold by the same Edge Company that had been somewhat infamous in the late 1980s for selling mail-order automatic knife “kits”—in which the blade would be packaged separately, to be installed upon receipt by the buyer—to skirt various localities’ switchblade laws. (1989 catalog here, for the interested.) In the memory of a poster to a different forum in 2007, the authorities put an end to this practice in around 1991, after which the company limped along, selling legal cutlery and cheap gadgets, until about the end of the decade. But in 2003, a poster to yet another forum asserted that a “new” Edge Company was going to be operating out of California; this would line up well enough with the domain name registration record to suggest that the Machine Watch was an early 2000s offering from a reconstituted version of the Edge Company. Reconstituted, but not destined to prosper or be heard from ever again, because there the trail goes cold—and there sits a sizable cache of new old stock in Sebastian, Florida, waiting to be bought on eBay. It is also worth observing that this is, according to the included original instruction manual (such as it is), officially “Machine Watch III.” As of yet, I have located no evidence for the existence of Machine Watches I or II.

Now to the watch itself. Nobody equipped with that historical information and/or functioning eyes should be surprised to learn that this thing is in no material sense “good.” It is made mostly of metal, which counts for something, anyhow, but the exact nature of the metal is unspecified. The watch makes no claims whatsoever to water resistance, and based on direct observation, I would studiously avoid getting it wet. The rectangular case measures a surprisingly modest 30mm wide by 41mm lug to lug, but the novelty flip-up dial cover more or less doubles the watch’s’ thickness to a total of about 13.6mm. Which, though a fair piece thicker than any quartz watch needs to be, doesn’t actually feel particularly obtrusive.

The case back, still protected by peel-off plastic film, snaps off to reveal a tiny no-account quartz movement, which, with a new battery installed by the eBay seller, seems to be keeping time more or less accurately. Of course, without a timegrapher I can’t say for sure—because though the 22mm dial is printed with crosshairs, the Edge Company diamond-and-knife logo, and the single word MACHINE, it is unadorned by indices of any other kind, and therefore cannot be used to tell time with any degree of precision beyond perhaps 5-minute approximations.

The hands are Breguet-style: a little unusual, though in the context of such a suis generis design, it’s a little hard to say what’s appropriate and what isn’t. The flat crystal, whatever it’s made of, doesn’t distort anything beneath, and though it’s almost certainly not AR-treated in any way, the flipped-open cover acts as a sort of lean-to shelter to provide some shade under most conditions, so you don’t really have to worry about not being able to tell what time it’s within about five minutes of.

Unless your viewing angle is such that either of the giant “pistons” bridging the case and the cover happens to be in the way of the dial, which is far from uncommon. This would seem somewhat more forgivable if they served some practical purpose, but as it happens, they are there for aesthetics alone; a spring at the cover’s hinge provides the actual force to snap it open when the tiny knob at the bottom of the case is pulled out of the way. (At which point the pistons rattle loosely in their mounts, not even doing so much as maintaining tension on the cover at the extremity of its travel.) And though that cover—the watch’s principal design concept and raison d'être—looks inarguably cool (and depending on the robustness of the crystal, is arguably functional!), its presence means that an extra hand and several extra seconds are required whenever the wearer wants to know approximately what time it is.

The bracelet is pure jewelry in the sense of prioritizing form to the near-exclusion of function. More than half its length comprises big rigid side links: less uncomfortable than I feared they’d be, but far from a pleasure to wear. Those are joined by articulating connector links and a really dismal jewelry-style clasp that requires a free hand, a separate stable surface, and an abundance of patience to fasten. With no half-links or micro-adjust, getting a decent fit with this thing is basically down to luck. (And I didn’t get particularly lucky!)

So its quality is dubious. It’s no good at all for actually telling time. It’s uncomfortable to wear. And yet...well, it’s kinda cool, isn’t it? In terms of pure aesthetics, I can’t call the Machine Watch a failure. It manages to be exactly what I think it aims to be, and is quite unmistakably itself, take it or leave it. Considered as a watch, it’s bad enough to barely count as a watch at all. Considered as a design artifact with a hidden time-approximation feature, though—perhaps an accessory for Matrix cosplay or for wearing to a Front 242 concert or some such?—it works. Part of me wants the “good” version: the one with great build quality and a proper dial and little pistons that actually slow-open the cover hydraulically. But that version would have to cost a bunch more than $36 with shipping included, and if I’m spending much more than that, something like this is almost certainly not what I’m in the market for.

So I can’t actually recommend the Machine Watch. But if you’re a certain kind of person—the kind who might have, somewhere in your office, a little model of a time machine built out of a DeLorean, say—I also can’t say that you’d necessarily regret adding one to your collection. Just saying.

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ADDENDUM: Big thanks to @TrickyDickWikkit, who shared with me pictures of a very similar watch that he bought under a different brand name (“X DATA”) 25 years ago—just when I’ve estimated the Machine Watch to have been on the market originally. Oddly, though the X DATA watch is clearly a close variation on the same theme, it is obvious from the photos that the two watches have no major parts actually in common. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see two of these with different branding printed on the dials. But the two in question here have at least different cases, covers, bracelet side links, and cover release catches. (The X DATA model has an acrylic window in its cover, so about one third of the approximate time is always visible without the watch having to be popped open; and it’s got a different, apparently lumed, handset!) So either one Chinese manufacturer sank extra cost into making variants, or one company copied another, (and maybe not just one; a Google search for X DATA watches turns up additional related styles!) or something. One suspects that this is a mystery destined never to be solved due to complete lack of interest.