Towards midnight at the end of September, in a muddy arm of the Amazon basin, the air was still thirty degrees. On the deck of a small research boat two people, the biophysicist Dr Arda Yılmaz and the neurobiologist Dr Clara Mendes, were watching the cables of the electrodes they had lowered into the water. In the black river there was nothing to see. Then, with no warning at all, a sheer voltage spike climbed the oscilloscope.
There was no battery in the water, no generator, not a single gram of copper winding. The instruments had nonetheless recorded a direct current pulse several times what comes out of a wall socket.
Look at that waveform, said Dr Yılmaz. To reach that we need lithium cathodes, sulphuric acid, copper coils and cooling. The animal down there just did the same thing without any of them.
Because the arrangement down there owes nothing to our idea of a battery, said Dr Mendes. Roughly four fifths of an electric eel’s body is given over to disc shaped muscle cells called electrocytes. On its own each one does almost nothing; it holds less charge than a torch battery. But thousands of them are stacked end to end along the tail, and a single command from the brain throws open the sodium and potassium gates in every membrane at the same instant.
Two comparisons carry the point. One remote control battery runs nothing, but connect five hundred of them in series and you have enough to move a tram; the thousands of electrocytes in that body are stacked to exactly that logic, in a precise geometry. The second is harder. Sixty thousand people clapping at random in a stadium produce noise, but if every one of them claps once in the same fraction of a second the pressure wave will rattle the glass. The eel’s nerve network delivers the order all the way down the tail with microsecond timing.
The highest figure measured in the genus is about eight hundred and sixty volts, and it belongs to Electrophorus voltai, described only in 2019. The long familiar Electrophorus electricus stays nearer six hundred. In either case there is no metal, no acid and no waste. After the discharge the ions inside the cells return to their stations and the system recharges in seconds.
format_quote"No chemical decay, no heat, no waste. Only ions going back to their places."
Hasan Bekmezci
Watchmaking too produces, now and again, something that abandons the settled form with the same nerve. When Ulysse Nardin showed the first Freak in 2001 there was no dial, no hour hand, no minute hand and no crown. The movement turned inside the case, and turning, it told the time. The Freak X is where that idea stands today, and the Magma version paints it red.
The forty three millimetre case is pressed from ultralight carbon fibre and red marbled epoxy resin under heat and pressure. The fibres run differently through every press, so no two examples carry the same pattern. Each red vein on the case belongs to that single piece rather than to a production run.
Inside works the calibre UN-230. It has two hundred and fourteen components and twenty one jewels, and at thirty four and a half millimetres across it fills very nearly the whole case. It is self winding and holds seventy two hours. The way it tells the time rests on a flying carousel: the body of the movement sweeps out the minutes as it turns, while the baseplate beneath it carries the hours. There is no dial to consult. What you consult is the mechanism.
It beats three times a second, twenty one thousand six hundred times an hour. Against the hurry of a modern chronometer that is a calm rhythm, and it gives the great oscillation turning inside the case a weight the eye can follow. The escapement is silicon, which is indifferent to magnetism, does not corrode and needs no oil. Much as the eel fires without burning its own tissue, the movement runs without grinding itself away.
format_quote"Take away the dial and what is left is not the time, but the thing that makes it."
Hasan Bekmezci
Someone looking at the red veins in this case may well think of that spark at the bottom of the Amazon. The resemblance is the viewer’s reading, not a claim made by the manufacturer. But the same matter stands in both places: power comes out of order, not out of brute force. Had six thousand cells fired at random the result would have been a murmur rather than a shock. Had two hundred and fourteen parts been laid out at random the result would have been scrap rather than a watch.
The microsecond agreement in a fish’s nerve network did not assemble itself. Nobody taught the cell where and when to release its charge; it was born knowing. What a person does is not to found that order but to notice it and attempt an imitation. A watchmaker has years to align two hundred and fourteen parts. The fish was not given a second.
format_quote"Power comes out of order, not out of brute force. Six thousand cells firing at random would only murmur."
Hasan Bekmezci
The Freak X Magma is a high voltage strike aimed at the composed conventions of Swiss watchmaking. Each time you look at those lava red fibres and at the carousel turning in open space, you begin to suspect that time is not simply a matter of hard gears, and that even the smallest point in the universe runs on a flawless calculation.
The watch on its maker’s own site: Ulysse Nardin, Freak X Magma