LumiNova, or Super-LumiNova, is ubiquitous throughout the watch industry today, even more so than most imagine: Rolex’s ChromaLight and Timex’s IndiGlo, to name two trademarked substances, are re-branded types of LumiNova. The substance doesn’t glow on its own but needs to be activated, or “charged,” by an external light source in essence, the light your watch dial absorbs during the day is ideally enough to make its luminous elements glow brightly at night, after which it will require charging again the next day. Unlike all the materials that preceded it, LumiNova - called Super-LumiNova by the firm that makes it entirely in Switzerland - was different in that it acts as something of a light absorbing, energy-storing battery. Contracted by the Japanese military to make luminous paint for the gauges of WWII-era aircraft, Nemoto turned his attention to creating a phosphorescent, non-radioactive type of paint to apply to watch dials after the end of the war, founding the company in 1962 that would eventually develop LumINova in 1993. The use of tritium has for the most part been entirely supplanted by a non-radioactive luminous substance that traces its origins all the way back to 1941 and a Japanese inventor named Kenzo Nomoto. Tritium-based paints on dials, which were used by numerous watch brands, including Rolex, were banned in 1998. Used on surfaces like dials, tritium had a tendency to diffuse, seeping through the case and into the skin of a wearer. Tritium, which was used in small amounts to boost the explosive power of the atomic bomb detonated on May 1951 over the Enetawak Atoll, was not entirely without risk, however. Next up was Tritium H-3, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen with a respectable half-life of 12.3 years and, as a low-energy beta emitter, far less hazardous to work with than radium. Replacing radium for a short time as the luminous substance on watch dials was a compound called Promethium (Pm-147), which was less radioactive but had a half-life of only two-and-a-half years and thus a much shorter period of luminescence. In the 1920s, the mostly female factory workers that painted the watch dials with radium compounds started falling ill and dying at alarming rates, leading to lawsuits against the companies that produced the material and eventually, safer working conditions and an abandonment of radium as a luminous substance in watchmaking by the 1960s. The first material applied to watch dials for nighttime luminescence was radium paint, which, thanks to radium’s half-life of 1,600 years, offered a long-lasting glow during that period before dimming - the catch being that, as its name implies, radium (specifically Radium-226, which was used as the base of the “Radiomir” substance registered by Guido Panerai ) is radioactive. And while this approach proved to be much more cost-effective and practical, it also brought a new set of challenges, as the earliest substances used on the dials were discovered to be unsafe, for the people who made the watches and, to a lesser extent, those who wore them. In the 1900s, a more practical option presented itself: treating a watch’s dial with luminous paint that made its time display visible in darkness. These types of watches, aka minute repeaters and sonneries, are quite rare and expensive today and regarded as luxuries rather than the utilitarian inventions they initially were. The first solution was not a visual but an audible one: watches that could chime the current hour and minute on demand. The need to read the time in the dark has been a challenge for the makers of timepieces for hundreds of years. 0% interest for up to 24 months available on select brands.
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