How a mechanical watch works, in your browser
A hand-wound movement, drawn from CAD, running in the browser and coming apart as you scroll. I built it to make a complicated machine understandable. The same care applies to whatever your company needs explained.
I am an amateur horologist. A mechanical watch is a hard thing to explain to someone who has never had one open. A hundred or so parts, a mainspring pushing a train of wheels, an escapement that lets the power out one tick at a time, a balance that decides how fast, and hands that make all of it mean something. Every part depends on every other part. You cannot understand one without the rest.
So I built a way to show it. It is at how-a-mechanical-watch-works.balian.dev. A real movement, the ETA 6497 that watchmaking students learn on, runs in your browser. It is drawn as outlines like a service manual, with the part you are reading about in colour. You scroll, and it comes apart one stage at a time: power, the train, the escapement, the balance, the hands, setting the time. You can slow it down to watch the escapement do its job. You can cut it in half. At the end you get the controls and can turn it over yourself.
It is my attempt at taking something genuinely complicated and making it understandable to a layperson. I am not fully happy with it yet. Some chapters explain too much, some too little, and the escapement still deserves a better treatment than I have given it. I will keep working on it.
Two things I did insist on. The mechanism is correct: every wheel turns at the speed its tooth count says it should, in the right direction, and the balance beats at the published rate. A check runs before anything is published and fails if I got a number wrong. And it is clear. Shiny rendered metal looks nice and explains nothing, so it is drawn the way a technical drawing is drawn.
The model itself is not mine. CAD model: ETA 6497-1 by Steen Winther (GrabCAD), used under the terms of GrabCAD’s licensing for non-commercial or internal use. He drew every part. I made it run.
What this has to do with your company
Most businesses have something that is hard to explain. A machine your sales team describes with a PDF. A process a new hire takes six months to understand. Numbers that live in four systems and never line up. None of those have as many moving parts as a watch, and most of them already have the CAD or the data sitting there, waiting to be shown.
What carries over is the approach more than the code, though the code carries too. Get the mechanism right before making it pretty, and check it automatically so it stays right. Draw for understanding instead of for shine. Keep the story in a file that someone who is not a programmer can edit. Make it work on a phone, from a keyboard, and as plain text when the graphics fail. That is how I built the watch, and it is how I would build yours.
If you have something that is hard to explain, I would like to see it.