A Mechanical Alarm Watch That Every President Owns

Forget about figuring out how to set the alarm on your new Apple Watch. The Vulcain Cricket can wake you up in the morning and you don't even have to plug it in at night.

An alarm watch is exactly what it sounds like: In addition to keeping the time, the movement will trigger a tiny hammer to ring a gong at a designated moment. In the days before digital timers, it was either a mechanical alarm clock like this—or a rooster (or, OK, a bedside clock). Vulcain was the first to shrink the technology into a wrist-size package that was still loud enough to do its job, and in 1947 it started selling the Cricket alarm watch. Since then, a few competitors have popped up like the Tudor Advisor and the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, but alarm watches are a tiny niche in the already niche world of mechanical watchmaking.