Adrian Hailwood, Dreweatts' Senior Watch Specialist, discusses highlights from the selection of watches in Fine Jewellery, Watches, Silver and Objects of Vertu, on 28 November

The sedate ‘tick-tock’ of passing seconds is usually associated with elegant long-case clocks and their slow-swinging pendulums. Watches, both pocket and wrist, tend to beat much faster, slicing their seconds into finer segments.

Before quartz watch movements made a ticking second hand ubiquitous and cheap, it took an additional complication in order to produce this effect. Such ‘dead-beat’ or ‘true-beat’ watches gave an impression of greater precision and made reading the time to the exact second easier, even if time-keeping was not actually improved.

In modern watchmaking, a true-beat movement is part of the theatre of watch ownership; like a tourbillon it is horological ‘showing off’ done just because you can. It provides the novelty of a ticking watch that is not a quartz. The Arnold & Son DSTB (Dial Side True Beat) takes this sense of theatre one stage further, locating the regulating mechanism on the dial in plain view. For students of watchmaking it is a master class in how this venerable complication functions, for others there is a mesmerising, hypnotic fascination as the levers click back and forth, releasing the seconds hand one step at a time.