Carpe Lux Seize the Light

Sergant Sloth knows what time it is.

My wife doesn’t like clocks in general, and reserves a special objection for the kind that insist on glowing redly in the bedroom. I on the other hand want to orient myself in the night, to calculate my desperation when sleep will not come. In the past I have made do with a phone, but a phone is not a watch or a clock; it just does a poor impression of both.

If the lume on my Casio S100 is fully charged at bedtime it will be just barely visible in the early morning, but it’s dim enough that I misread the hour. My first thought to solve this privileged problem was a Timex with Indiglo, that electroluminescent staple of the 90s. But Timex three-handers are notoriously loud tickers, so that was out. Then I thought maybe a basic quartz LCD Casio with a backlight. The cool kids are wearing these now and there’s a logical honesty about the designs, but that doesn’t change their essential gracelessness, and you have to press a button to light them up, or faff with reportedly unreliable “auto light” features.

Then I thought of tritium. Watches with tritium gas-filled tubes glow all night, every night, for a decade or two. Ball is probably the best-known user of tritium, but I wasn’t looking to drop a grand or three on a watch to wear to bed at night. And since tritium does fade, it seems like something you don’t want on an expensive timepiece.

The traser P59. Somewhat tactical, barely radioactive.

Outside of Ball’s dressy-sport watches, though, tritium mostly appears on watches with military aspirations, and tacticool is definitely not my thing. Eventually I found this traser (sic) P59. The 37mm version on a nylon strap is about as cheap as it gets for a tritium watch that you don’t have to buy on AliExpress. It definitely has a tactical vibe, but it’s not over the top. We’ll get into the watch in a minute; first, allow me a digression on tritium, a most violent isotope.

Hellfire Hydrogen

Humans are overachievers. Even before the first nuclear bomb exploded, clever primates were thinking about making something far more powerful. Fission only gets you so far, it turns out; if you really want to make a bang, fusion is the way to go. And tritium, which is just hydrogen with two extra neutrons, makes great fusion fuel. In our semi-post-cold war world, some people seem a little fuzzy on what an “H bomb” is, and how it might differ from a plain old nuclear bomb. Let’s hope it stays that way, because if you have to think seriously about the distinction, things are grim indeed.

The “Tsar Bomba” Soviet nuclear test of 1961, the largest explosion humanity has so far set off. Mostly fused hydrogen at work here, yielding a 50 megaton kaboom. (This image is apparently a still from a PR video the Russian atomic agency released in 2020, I guess trying to remind people of the good old days.)

Back when radioactivity was the exciting future, we figured out that if you mix radium, which has a half-life of 1,600 years and blasts out ionizing gamma radiation as it decays, with a phosphorescent compound, you could make glowing paint. What fun! People put it on watches and clocks, on their faces and lips and finger nails. I won’t rehash the story of the radium girls here, but many of them paid for this panacea of light with their teeth and tongues and lives. Radium was so hot that it quickly cooked off the phosphorescent component of the paint, leaving us with the dead but now-desirable yellow-beige pigment that is recreated on vintage-inspired watches with modern, safe, boring lume. I should not say boring, because if you dig into how non-radioactive lume works, it’s pretty cool. But it’s not as cool as something hot — Imagine Dragons never wrote a song about it.

Tritium, in addition to fueling world-ending bombs, makes things glow without the cancerous downsides of radium. It’s radioactive, but in a gentle way, emitting beta particles as it breaks down, which as I understand it, are just electrons. The tritium decay betas fizzle out after trying to fly through a few millimeters of air, and human skin is like kevlar against them.

In the 90s someone figured out how to make hot lume safe: tritium in a jar. A tiny borosilicate glass tube, to be exact, full of tritium gas, and painted on the inside with a radiophosphor. As the beta particles zing out of the decaying tritium, they energize the phosphor, and voila: a soft, steady glow. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years, and doesn’t fry the phosphors as quickly, so you can expect a good decade or more of glow (some watch brands even claim 25 years, and they’re all using the same tubes). That’s more than you get out of radium paint, and a lot more than was possible from the safer-but-less-effective successor to radium, promethium, with a half-life of just 2.6 years.

Besides watches aimed at the military and military cosplayers, these tritium vials find their way into gunsights, to make shooting people in the dark easier. For some reason this rare hydrogen isotope often bends towards death.

But beta particles are not just about serving the violent whims of man. Check this out:

I recorded this at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. It’s what’s called a “cloud chamber,” which is a simple arrangement involving evaporated alcohol above a refrigerated surface: you can make one from stuff you pick up at the supermarket, if you live around supermarkets that sell dry ice. What we see here are the passage of charged particles, mostly arriving from space (more romantically termed “cosmic rays”). The fat tracks that look like Hollywood lines of coke are from high-energy gamma particles slamming through the gaseous alcohol. The squiggly, spindly tracks are beta particles, deflected from a straight line by impacts with molecules. Not all beta particles are created equal, apparently: these extraterrestrial bad boys come screaming through the atmosphere and the museum walls, dire wolves compared to the chihuahuas trapped in my borosilicate tubes. I can tell you it was hard to pull myself away from this thing.

The Night’s Watch

Normally I put a premium on horological provenance: I value a good watch story, and I’m put off by pretenders that, say, resurrect a defunct name and claim “since 1893” or something. traser lacks any such pretensions: it’s just a name dreamed up by mb-microtec ag (which clearly has a real beef with capital letters), the Swiss company that supplies tritium tubes to most of the watch industry, as well as arms makers. The tubes are branded as “trigalight,” which sounds more gunny than watchy. So traser exists to sell trigalight. If you want to bring your own trigalight-blinged watch to market, mb-microtec is also happy to help you produce it. They’re not precious; they just want to move that tritium. Capitalists who hate capital letters.

I initially assumed that mb-microtec used white-label watchmakers in Switzerland, but no, they make the watches themselves at their facility in Niederwangen. I asked, and got an answer in less than a day! So trasers are “Swiss Made,” and not in a generic sense. Which I like. A bit of authenticity after all.

Where the magic happens: the mb-microtech facility, in an office park in a suburb of Bern. Check out the company car!

The 37mm P59 Essential S on a NATO strap is the cheapest traser you can buy. You get a steel case, sapphire crystal, 10 bar water resistance. I paid 200 EUR for mine; you can get the P59 on a leather or Milanese strap for a bit more, which is probably worth it for most people because the Nato feels like disposable packaging. It also adds a couple of millimeters of height on the wrist that this watch desperately does not need. But for sleeping, it’s fine.

The least inspiring spec is the ultra-basic ETA 804.112 quartz movement: “Swiss Made” as it has to be for the watch to qualify as the same, but plastic, un-jeweled, and spot-welded into unrepairability. The second hand alignment on my example isn’t terrible, but it’s hardly perfect and varies a bit. The minute hand also has an odd habit of slipping a little after setting the watch, even when I “back into” the time as one is supposed to. The accuracy of this bog-standard movement has none-the-less been impressive; it’s certainly not thermo-compensated, but by luck it hasn’t drifted by even one second in the few months I’ve been wearing the watch.

The specs overall are not bad for the price point; you’ll find disposable quartz movements like this one in watches that sell for a lot more. But what about the design? Well, the watch looks like it was put together by a company mainly interested in selling something else. The proportions are a bit wonky: the watch is oddly thick for its size, presumably to accommodate the towering hand stack, itself a glaring tell-tale of a watch that’s been assembled from off-the-shelf parts. You could fly a jetliner through the gap between the second and minute hands: even taking into account the thickness that the tritium tube adds to the minute hand, there is a lot of room there. The dial seems to lie at the bottom of a well that your peer down into through the flat crystal.

The oddly spaced-out hand stack, using plenty of the generous vertical real estate provided by the oddly recessed dial.

That dial is simple, matte black with lumed numbers, hour markers, and a chapter ring that looks nice when it’s not obscured by the walls of the case. My variant of the P59 has black hands (glossy, enamel-like paint) that don’t exactly stand out against the black dial, but the tubes on the hands keep the watch readable. The larger arabics at 12, 6 and 9 (a tiny date window replaces the 3) give the dial a drop of personality. At least it’s not another Dirty Dozen homage.

The lume works fine as paint, but as lume, it’s garbage. It shines bright for a few minutes, but within an hour it’s gone dark. It’s allegedly Super-LumiNova, but apart from surely being standard grade, I wonder if it’s been watered down with something else.

The case is steel — PVDed black on my version, but also available as bare metal. I normally avoid PVD coatings because I’m afraid they’ll scratch, but since my sheets are really soft I figured that wouldn’t be a problem here. The PVD means there’s no finishing to comment on; it’s all just… black. There are crown guards protecting an unsigned (*cough* catalog part) crown.

There’s nothing wrong with a diminutive case diameter if you scale down the thickness appropriately. The case is 10.3 mm deep here, more than a quarter of the width. A good ratio for a hamburger, but not so much for a watch.

Speaking of finishing, PVD can’t hide everything. Under a loupe, you’ll see the watch’s cheapness in the rough edges of the hands, with the black paint not being thick enough to conceal the marks. The pin cap is also off-center on mine. The round date window is a little distorted, and the date does not always line up perfectly, though it’s so small that I can barely read it anyway.

Look, design-wise, this watch doesn’t completely come together, and the level of finishing is about what you’d expect for something “Swiss Made” at this price; if you’re paying Swiss watchmakers to put something together, with health insurance and their own parking spaces and everything, there’s not going to be much left for polishing the hands.

But who really cares? Because the headline feature of this watch is the frickin’ nuclear-powered lighting, and it glows just fine. You get a long tube on the minute hand, a shorter one on the hour, and indices at 12, 3, 6, and 9. The 12 o’clock marker is orange, which gets you oriented — the rest glow light green. The are also two tiny “hair lights” around the traser branding, an unnecessary but nifty flourish (these are set into cutouts in the dial, which suggest that at least that part is made specifically for this watch and not picked from a catalog).

Compared to good fully-charged lume, the trigalights are tame; while sunlight-charged lume fairly thrums with luminance if you, say, peer at the watch under the shadow of your hand, the tritium glow is dim enough to be invisible unless you’re in really low ambient light. But conventional lume dumps most of its photons within a few minutes, even if it manages to glow dimly for hours more. Very quickly, the trigalights surpass even good luminous paint and if you look at the watch in darkness with adjusted eyes, it practically sings out the time.

Against the Dying of the Light

I was curious about how the discharge curve of conventional lume compares to the steady glow of decaying tritium so I gave both the P59 and my Casio Oceanus S100 a good blast of LED light and then took some photos in the dark. I held the exposure constant for the first two shots and then dropped it by a stop for the second two, to better suggest the experience of seeing the lume in the dark. Behold.

Here we are at T0. Like most lume shots you find online, this is actually brighter than it looked in reality. The coventional lume clearly outshines the tritium tubes.

T+3 minutes, approximately. The not-so-Super-LumiNova on the P59 has dimmed to match its tritium. The S100’s lume remains brighter.

T+5 minutes. The P59’s Super-LumiNova is really fading now.

At this point, I went and watched an episode of Satoshi Kon’s bizarrely compelling animated series Paranoia Agent. L’il Slugger walloped the copycat.

Raaiiyaa    ra    ra i yo ra    a magnificent mushroom cloud in the sky…

Then I took one more picture.

T+a little more than a half hour. The trigalight is now brighter than the S100’s lume. The P59’s own conventional lume is invisible.

So, even though the conventional lume is hella bright off the line, it quickly fades to parity with tritium, and drops lower in less than half an hour. The Casio S100’s lume remains technically visible in a black room even after six or seven hours to newly opened eyes, but my vision is so bleary at that point that I can’t distinguish the double-index at 12 o’clock from the rest, so I sometimes find myself misreading the time by an hour. The orange index of the P59 solves this problem, and the tritium looks positively brilliant in the darkest hour of the soul.

Conclusion

If you want a legit Swiss watch with tritium lume on the cheap, you won’t get much cheaper than this. A Swiss Luminox will run you a lot more. Ditto a plastic Marathon, never mind a steel version. Ditto ProTek, which apparently makes an “official” US Marine Corps watch but is very coy about where they’re actually produced, so I don’t think it’s Camp Pendleton. If you like to live dangerously, I suppose you could try your luck with one of the various off-brand Chinese watches on AliExpress — they seem to use the same tritium tubes, but everything else about them is a crapshoot. They tend to be more visually adventurous than the P59, but not necessarily in a good way.

If you want a watch that’s stylistically compelling, or graceful, or with an engrossing horological provenance, the P59 isn’t it. But if you’re committed to tritium, you’re already fishing in a pretty shallow pond anyway.

There’s also an “M” variant of the P59, with a wider case. I suspect it would address some of my problems with proportionality (it’s 42mm wide, but the same thickness as the “S”). It costs a bit more, but I think it would be worth it for anyone who actually wants to wear the watch out in the world.

But as an in-the-dark-time-telling tool, the P59 S fulfils its mission. For me, it falls short as a fetish object, but I guess I’m OK with that. I have other watches to fetishize, even if I don’t take them to bed.