I know that mechanical watches have a spring that they wind to store energy, and un-winding the spring produces energy for the watch. But a spring produces a lot of force when it’s very tightly wound, and very little when it’s almost completely un-wound. So how does the watch even that out with high precision?
In: 95
They don’t keep perfect time, far from it, it is why quartz took over when batteries became cheap enough to put in a wrist appliance. You don’t need much power to vibrate a crystal.
In short though, the entire stereotype of the swiss watchmaker comes from the fact that they spent the time to finely tune their craft so there would be very little slop in the function while not being too tight that the metal grinds. One of the selling points with expensive watches was if they were sent to a lab and were certified as a chronometer, it meant you would lose a maximum of 4 seconds or gain a maximum of 6 seconds a day. That is laughably bad compared to a cheap quartz watch.
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