Timekeepers Read online

  Despite his enthusiasm, Jones met mostly resentment and obstruction; the skilled French-speaking locals didn’t take kindly to the disruption of working practices that had served them since their earliest clock manufacture 400 years before. He received a warmer welcome in the German-speaking north of the country; the inhabitants of Schaffhausen particularly liked the prospect of 100 new jobs.

  IWC’s initial output was disappointing: Jones told his creditors he would produce 10,000 watches a year, yet by 1874 the company had sold barely 6,000 in total. The Swiss banking shareholders loosened Jones’s control, and only nine years after the company’s formation he was sent back to Boston (his watchmaking and engineering exploits continued, but he died in his mid-70s in some poverty). Today, his name lingers in IWC’s hushed museum and one of its conference rooms. And it was here, in the Jones Room, that my own expertise in watch production came to the fore.

  One reason IWC will today let a complete novice make a complete fool of himself on the banks of the Rhine is to show why a £205,000 watch is actually worth £205,000 – in other words, how damn near unattainable the mastery of a master watchmaker is. Not that they’d actually let me loose on one of their top marques, of course. In front of me on the desk is the hand-wound Calibre 98200, at 37.8mm the largest the company has to offer, produced exclusively for watchmaking classes. My assignment entails removing 17 parts and then reappointing them again, to the point where the watch won’t yet function fully (there are neither hands nor a complete power train), but a few wheels and pinions will at least interconnect and be directed by the rod and crown. With less than an hour to complete the task, it’s construction for simpletons. ‘We have two ways of holding the screwdriver,’ my instructor says, lining up a zinger he has used a thousand times before. ‘The right way and the wrong way.’

  The removal and reconstruction entails repeatedly flipping the dial side and the underside. The easy part of the work – the bit that compares favourably with rewiring a plug – consists of screwing in bridges, the sections that hold the layers and complications in place. Rather trickier is the task of inserting the toothed-rim barrel encasing the mainspring beneath the minute wheel, and aligning a 0.15mm pivot with the jewels. (I was working with synthetically engineered rubies. These low-friction jewel bearings – used particularly in gear trains and anti-shock mechanisms – have traditionally given watches a hallmark of quality; the more of them one had, the greater the supposed accuracy, longevity and security of the movements. Without additional complications a traditional mechanical watch is replete with 17 jewels, but a multi-tiered IWC confection may demand as many as 62. The term ‘complications’ is used for anything in a watch superfluous to telling the time, such as a feature showing the phase of a moon.)

  Making anything really small tends to be extremely expensive, at least at prototype and the final manual pass. In the watch industry, the precision of the tiny parts is one reason for the great cost (even the tiniest screw costs eight Swiss francs; actually because it is such a tiny screw). Then there is the relentless endurance with minimum lubrication, an additional reason that men admire these watches so much. But the major contributory factors are human and old-fashioned – the wisdom, handed down through centuries, required to make something beautiful and functional from an otherwise inanimate assemblage of metal and stones. ‘It’s the worst thing to say,’ Bresser tells me, ‘but it’s the God complex, or the Frankenstein complex. You have the white overcoat, and you’re creating life.’ Midway through my attempt to do something similar, as I’m tweezering the arresting pin, he says, ‘If you drop it, you’re not actually a watchmaker so I’m not going to hurt you.’

  As I tried not to drop screws on the floor, I considered a new challenge, and you may attempt it too: try to name just one famous living master watchmaker. No rush: very few people beyond the inner circles can do it, and the craft has always been happiest hidden.2 But these craftspeople – almost all of them men – are surely worthy of our attention. Christian Bresser, for example, is 43. He tells me he once wanted to be a fighter pilot. As a boy growing up in Jamaica and then Florida, his main hobby was building toy models. He had little interest in watchmaking until taking an apprenticeship at a German goldsmith’s in his late 20s. ‘I realized it’s a very emotional thing. Certain early watches I built I look on as my kids.’ In 2000 he went looking for a job at several Swiss companies, including Rolex, Omega and Zenith, and he found them ‘shiny shiny’ but lacking the smaller family environment he experienced at IWC (the company employed about 500 people then; now it’s more than 1,000). One of his tasks at interview sounded familiar: disassembling and assembling a watch. The difference was, his involved rather more delicate parts, and the movement had an inbuilt fault he had to detect. ‘When I began I had the watchmaking vocabulary of a 10-year-old,’ he says. Today his talent is split between making perpetual calendars and double chronographs, and marketing and educating. He holds his basic watchmaking class on a regular basis, as much a sales exercise as one of horology: the novice visitor feels good about completing a simple process, and this enriched appreciation of pinions and pivots will lead, within the hour, to the glittering baubles in the gift shop.

  The gift shop is situated next to the museum, and both suggest that, on the practical level, IWC is still run on tracks laid down almost 150 years ago: the efficiency of the mechanised production line combined with the meticulous mastery of the finishing line. But the museum, with all its display of ingenuity, falls rather short of telling the whole story of IWC and its enduring message of weathering storms. The company has survived many challenges and fluctuations: in watch trends and currency markets, changing labour demands and work practices, as well as fierce and brilliant competition from 300 or so other Swiss watchmakers, Chinese knock-offs; and now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is facing a whole new type of competition – from, of all things, a computer company.

  The weather from Cupertino hangs as heavy over Schaffhausen as it does over the rest of Switzerland, but the threat from the Apple Watch is about something bigger than a single product. This is the prospect of total digital connectivity, the challenge of how far and how soon we are prepared to control everything in our lives from our skin, either with it (the smartphone) on it (the smart watch) or under it (chips ahoy). No one has the answer to this yet, but no one in Switzerland can afford to ignore it, just as they couldn’t really afford to ignore the impact of quartz.

  Unlike the impact of quartz, which was a new cheap way of doing the same thing, the smart watch does a great many new things too, with timekeeping decidedly the least important. When the Apple Watch began to appear on people’s wrists in 2015, many felt disappointed: it didn’t seem to do much that an iPhone couldn’t do, except on a smaller scale. It notified you of incoming calls and email, just like the phone, and it could store your travel documents and pay for your coffee, and monitor your fitness workout. The beautiful flapping butterfly screensaver on the matt-black face was for some, with more money than sense, more than enough to justify the purchase, but for others, not least in the mechanical watchmaking industry, the butterfly signalled chaos. The Apple Watch (and its cheaper Android competitors from Samsung, Pebble and elsewhere) was a potential signifier of doom. Up to the middle of 2014, the response from Switzerland to Apple and its clones had been either muted or dismissive, a complication it would barely acknowledge; but things have changed, not least because the grand old masters were in downturn.

  At IWC the opening gambit is called IWC Connect. This is not a watch but a strap, available initially just for its pilot watches, and the strap contains a big button. Press this and turn it, and you have a link to your phone and apps and health features and email notifications. The device is a discomfiting nod to the microprocessor, the antithesis and sworn enemy of traditional haute horologie; its position on a strap is the Swiss way of embracing the digital advance while distancing itself from both its inelegance and its threat. An IWC watch wil
l not, in the foreseeable future, offer an MP3 player or camera, much less a biannual upgrade of its operating system, preferring to tick on beautifully, and mechanically, waiting until the storm passes, hoping that it does.

  ii) Just What Is It About the Swiss?

  How did this unassuming, landlocked country come to dominate an industry that it didn’t establish? How did it move from a mastery of dairy production to a mastery of dairy production and miniature precision mechanics? And how did it refine the idea of charging tens of thousands of Swiss francs for an object that often kept time less accurately than an object costing £10? (Or how, when the Swiss exported 29 million watches in 2014, did this figure account for only 1.7 per cent of all watches bought globally, but 58 per cent of their value?)

  In 1953, when Eugène Jaquet and Alfred Chapius published their vast and authoritative volume Technique and History of the Swiss Watch, they were slightly vague on the issue of provenance. The first watches – first round and then oval-shaped, and worn as large necklaces – appeared around 1510, initially in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy. A small trade developed in Geneva a few decades later, thanks largely to artisans employed as goldsmiths; filigree and enamel work, and experience with intricate engraving tools, enabled craftsmen to turn their attention to miniature mechanics. Jaquet and Chapius found records for 176 goldsmiths working in Geneva in the sixteenth century, and their emergent watchmaking skills were almost certainly aided by the arrival of Huguenot refugees from France. The earliest watches necessitated a certain bulkiness, for they accommodated a cone-shaped pulley mechanism known as a fusee to distribute the wound power as evenly as possible (rather than just running at full force at the start of a cycle and weakly at the end of it). The balance spring (the wound hairspring that holds the power in a mechanical watch), was probably developed independently by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens and the English philosopher/scientist Robert Hooke in the mid-seventeenth century, and it greatly improved this control (and thus the timepiece’s accuracy). Before this the earliest watches dared tell only the hour, for their precision was often compared unfavourably to a sundial; the minute hand, also developed by Huygens and first utilised by the English clockmaker Daniel Quare, appeared only around 1670.

  The first signs of the Swiss exporting their wares came in 1632, when a watchmaker from Blois named Pierre Cuper II travelled to Geneva to commission 36 watches from Anthoine Arlaud; the order was required to arrive at Marseilles within a year. Other orders for watches made by Arlaud’s son Abraham and a certain Jean-Anthoine Choudens came in from Constantinople a few years later. It appeared that the Swiss had already established a reputation for superior quality and decoration: the Genevese were also masters of enamel cases. By the 1690s there were watchmakers in Basel, Berne, Zurich, Lucerne, Rolle, Moudon, Winterthur and Schaffhausen. Neuchâtel also became a prominent centre for skilled craftsmen fleeing religious persecution elsewhere in Europe, and Neuchâtel established what was probably the first watchmaking school, taking on apprentices in their early teens, valuing the importance to the canton, if not the country, of a watchmaking infrastructure. But it was La Neuveville in the Jura that lays claim to being the first city of horology; along with winemaking, the production of pocket watches became its principal occupation.

  None of which quite explains why it was Switzerland, rather than Germany or France, that gained the pre-eminent sterling reputation. But this is because the pre-eminent sterling reputation emerged primarily in the twentieth century. Prior to this, several other countries were just as prominent. Companies such as Breguet, Cartier and Lip in Paris, A. Lange & Söhne and many small firms based in Glasshütte in Germany – all produced prized specimens and established reputations. And in England, which could justifiably claim to be the innovative centre of clock and watchmaking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the choice of premier craftsmen was long: Edward East, William Clay, Thomas Mudge, John Harrison, Richard Bowen, Richard Towneley, the Frodsham family, Thomas Tompion and S. Smith & Sons in London and Cheltenham (‘Watchmakers to the Admiralty’) – all names now forgotten beyond the catalogue and the museum, mainly due to the habitual English practice (the railways, industrial manufacture, the national football team) of underinvestment and shrugging neglect of important concerns in which the country once led the world.3

  The Swiss just surely kept on going, occasionally buying up some of the best firms elsewhere in Europe, benefitting from the free trade movements of the mid-nineteenth century, and forming trade bodies and certification targets that increased the industry’s reputation for quality and honesty. In the nineteenth century, workshops expanded into mechanical manufacture that made full use of newly reliable escapement mechanisms and the tourbillon (invented respectively by Mudge in London and Breguet in Paris).4 The development of increasingly flat watches saw pocket watches develop into wristwatches; a watch on the wrist was particularly useful when riding. The Swiss also made full use of developments in winding, adopting early the stem and crown we have today as a replacement of the previous winding by key. The export trade set great store by all these improvements. By 1870, the Swiss watch industry was employing at least 34,000 people and making an estimated 1.3 million watches a year.

  And then there was war. Switzerland’s watchmakers flourished because of their country’s neutrality, and IWC was not alone in making wristwatches for opposing sides during the two world wars.5 But peacefulness, even as it aids concentration at the workbench, does not in itself explain the exquisite Longines or Ulysse Nardin, just as it does not explain the cuckoo clock.6 The most intriguing thing about Orson Welles’s memorable speech as Harry Lime in The Third Man is its flat inaccuracy:

  What the fellow said – in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!

  It is one of the few lines in the screenplay not written by Graham Greene. And it is not true: the cuckoo clock was first made in Germany, which has not enjoyed 500 years of democracy or peace.

  These days, the qualities that make a watch Swiss are classified legally, and are as closely regulated as champagne or Parmesan (the description on watches is always ‘Swiss made’ or just ‘Swiss’ rather than ‘Made in Switzerland’, a tradition dating back to 1890). To qualify, a watch must meet certain strict criteria (or, according to the Fédération de l’industrie horlogère suisse FH, where this classification originates, a watch must adhere to ‘The new requirements stipulated by Swissness’). To classify as ‘Swiss Made, a watch must a) have a Swiss movement, b) have this movement incorporated in a case that is made within Switzerland and c) be checked and certified in Switzerland. To classify as having a Swiss movement, a watch must a) have this movement assembled within Swiss borders, b) have this movement inspected and certified in Switzerland and c) include components with a minimum of 60 per cent of ‘Swiss value’ (this is up from the 50 per cent set by law in 1971). These laws do not appear to unduly trouble websites such as perfectwatches.cn, which offer Chinese replica (i.e. fake) Rolex Daytonas for £370 and Breitling Navitimers for £127.

  Perhaps the prominence and reputation of the Swiss watch may be best examined outside Switzerland, say in Australia. Here, for example, a man called Nick Hacko has been trying to make a watch that will be as robust and reliable as anything Geneva or Schaffhausen could offer, but assemble it in Sydney and sell it more cheaply, without the marketing hoopla. This is a feat that has become very difficult to achieve.

  Hacko, bullish in build but mild in temperament, is not only a watchmaker but also a watch repairer and a watch dealer – he calculates he has sold more than 9,500 Swiss timepieces and repaired 17,000 – and in all roles he has recently come to admire and loathe the Swiss in equal measure. When I walked into his office in mid-February 2014, pretty much the first thing he di
d was hand me a black T-shirt emblazoned on the back with a huge amount of text (the typeface was ubiquitous Swiss Helvetica). The T-shirt was a tract more than a garment, and if you met someone wearing it at a party you would probably move away fast. It read, in part:

  Yet another corporate monopoly forcing independent traders out of business . . . Swiss watch brands are working to ensure that any repair work is carried out exclusively in their workshop, on their terms. Support our campaign. Sign the petition. Save the time.

  ‘Here – have two!’ he said, as he gave me another. One was medium, one was large. ‘You’re probably between them,’ he said.

  English is not Nicholas Hacko’s first language. He was born in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s to a family of watch repairers, and he began fixing his own mechanisms when he was 12. He left not long after the outbreak of war in 1991, first to Germany and then, in 1994, to Australia, where he arrived, aged 31, with the most basic repair tools and 20,000 Australian dollars, most of which went on the bond securing his first shop. ‘I worked really hard,’ he remembers. ‘It takes about ten years to build your reputation.’

  His current shop has the feel of an office, occupying a suite of rooms on the fourth floor of a building in Castlereagh Street, Sydney’s equivalent of Regent Street. Directly below him are showrooms selling Dior, Cartier, Rolex and Omega, but he is dismissive of those who are swayed by such glitz. ‘A repairer is always looking from the inside out,’ he says, ‘But most collectors are all about looks. They love a brand name.’