Is this true?? (TI & watches)

I always felt the tuning-fork watehes and clocks [1] violated a basic principle of horology, and that is that the oscillator should be essentially 'free'. In the tuning form movement, IIRC, the fork is linked to a timy pawl that runs on a ratchet gear that then is geard down to drive the hands. Surely putting a possibly varying load on the osciallator is not conducive to goof timekeepiog? [1] I am told that Smiths (in the UK) sold a number of mantel (shelf) clocks with tuning fork movements. I am sort-of looking for one as a curiousity (I don;t care about the case style, or even if there is a case!. They certainly made transitor-maintained balance wheel movements for such clocks (which suffer from the same disadvantage that I've just mentioned). -tony