Timekeepers Page 14
Hacko is the P.T. Barnum of the dissenting watch world, a flamboyance particularly visible in an arena of the taciturn and retiring. He has 10,000 subscribers to his free newsletter, with another 300 paying for more specialist content. He describes himself and his breed as ‘a person who knows he is always right. A watchmaker talks a lot, complains even more, yet himself hates time-wasters. If you haven’t seen one in real life, think of Tom Hollander, just a bit shorter and less handsome.’
The wall of glass-fronted cases along one side of his office shimmers with exquisite items, but the visitor’s eye is drawn to the solid boxes nearer the entrance – an array of watch-winding machines that move gently back and forth to imitate the action of an arm in daily motion. ‘These are not for lazy people,’ he explains. ‘If you have a collection of automatic watches that are wound by being worn on the wrist, you need to keep them turning with power. It’s also a nice way to show them off.’
The watch he is making is called Rebelde, the Spanish word for rebel. It is a manual piece with a large crown, wide at 42mm and heavy in surgical-quality steel, and it has an arresting face, an unusual mixture of roman and Arabic numerals. Hacko designed and commissioned all the components himself, and the watch is a product of one simple thing: it ‘was not conceived as a brand to showcase the watchmaker’s genius, or even to fulfil a need for a mechanical timepiece,’ he explained on his blog. ‘It was born simply out of necessity for physical survival.’
‘The big picture is this,’ he tells me. ‘Watchmaking began who knows where. But we know when it moved to Switzerland for mass production and to America for cheap mass production. And then the Japanese started making fantastic stuff. But what has happened recently is more clear – the Swiss are operating a closed shop.’ He refers to the arguments on the T-shirt, specifically the unavailability of spare parts. ‘The worst thing of all is that they don’t admit why they’re doing it. They’re being greedy, but they don’t say “it’s to protect our sales”, but that independent watch repairers outside Switzerland can’t be trusted to do a good job. But these are the same repairers who have been keeping the Swiss industry alive for a hundred years!’
The Swiss policy has led, he says, to a great many experienced craftsmen struggling for their livelihoods. His watch is a protest at the freeze-out, and, by sharing the drawings and each stage of production on his blog, an attempt to inspire the next generation of watchmakers. Six months after I met him, his watches were ready for market. Six months after that he had sold almost 400, at prices ranging from $2,500 (stainless steel) to $13,900 (rose gold).
Hacko’s passion for horology occasionally verges on the suffocating (he talks about long-suffering wives bored by watch talk, and of chronic haemorrhoids from sitting down all day) but his obsessions have won a great many supporters. One day he wondered whether it would be possible to send a wristwatch – the same wristwatch – to every country on earth, and subscribers to his email bulletins have pledged to help him find out. The watch in question is a Davosa, a Swiss brand from the Jura mountains with its roots in the 1860s. The watch had to be worn ticking on land at 340 places, including tiny specks in the Pacific, Central Kiribati, Western Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and of course both polar regions. Ideally there should be proof (a local newspaper or landmark in the background), and if the watch was lost, or otherwise not returned to Hacko, then the challenge would be over.
Hacko was confident of success, but estimated that it could take between 5 and 12 years to complete the task. ‘Yes, we are in this for the long haul!’ At the time of writing, the watch has already visited the Philippines, West Malay, Singapore, India, Pakistan and, fittingly for Hacko, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia. And it has touched down in Switzerland and taken off from Switzerland.
I envied that watch. After my visit to IWC at Schaffhausen I was sitting in a departure lounge at Zurich airport, obligatory Lindt selection box at my side, surrounded by huge illuminated IWC adverts promoting a spirit of adventure and manliness at extremes both high and deep. Soon it would be time to set my clock back an hour, but there was a delay on the Heathrow flight: the departure board said ‘Wait in lounge’.
After 30 minutes or so, the board had the same message, except now other Swiss flights were also delayed. And then all the Swiss flights were cancelled. We went to the desk and were told to wait for further announcements, and everyone started checking their phones for flights on other airlines. It was already about 7 p.m., and there weren’t many flights left that evening. Then there was an announcement to proceed to the transfer desk at another terminal, and about 100 people started running, including those who clearly hadn’t run for a while. We were told there was some sort of technical fault with the onboard computers, although it wasn’t known why they all began to malfunction at once. Two or three couples at the front of the queue were transferred to a BA flight, but the rest of us got vouchers for hotels in town. We ran to cabs to beat fellow passengers to the rooms at the Best Western, and we used our meal vouchers to eat something filthy in the hotel bar.
At 6.30 the next morning we reassembled for the minibus, but at the airport the early flights had again been cancelled. One tries to be philosophical in these situations, and I reflected on all the ironies – Switzerland, of all places, home of perfect timing, watch shops almost every inch of the airport, and all these lives delayed, all this time wasted – but after a while it all just got extremely annoying. The next flight at mid-morning was definitely set to go, the mysterious computer problem all fixed apparently, although inevitably one asks oneself whether you really wanted to fly on that first one out, knowing what one does about the bugs one encounters when upgrading the operating system on a phone. And then a woman at the departure desk told us the precise reason for the delay. It was a leap second.
The day before was 30 June. Every three or four years the Earth’s rotation becomes sufficiently out of sync with our atomic timekeeping (known as Coordinated Universal Time or UTC) that it becomes necessary to make an adjustment.7 (Measured by an atomic clock, which is accurate to one second in 1,400,000 years, the regular day consists of 86,400 seconds. But the Earth’s rotation, which is affected by the gravitational drag of the moon, is very gradually slowing down, so that NASA scientists estimate that the solar day lasts on average about 86,400.002 seconds.) If nothing was done to correct this anomaly, after hundreds of thousands of years we would find that sunset occurred at noon. The addition of an extra second is usually made on 31 December, and it comes with warnings suggesting the possibility of doom. The more digitally connected we all are, the more our lives may be affected by an adjustment to universal time: when the last leap second was added in 2012, Quantas grounded 400 flights to accommodate its computer network’s failure to compute. The National Institute of Science and Technology at Maryland, which maintains a weighted average of atomic clocks from around the world, joined with the US Department of Homeland Security to issue a set of guidelines about the extra second, and included the information that during the transition atomic clocks, and those guided by them, would display the time (approaching midnight on 30 June 2015) as 23 hours, 59 minutes and 60 seconds, something one rarely sees. Alternatively, digital clocks might display ‘multiple 59 or 00s . . . or even just freeze the time for one second.’8
There have been 26 leap seconds added since the Earth was synchronised with UTC in 1972, and for years there has been dissent about the need for such a thing at all. The Americans tend to be against it, citing possible complications, like the threat of Y2K or grounded planes at airports. The British are definitely in favour, not least because it upholds a link with our very first, and most fundamental method of timekeeping, the sun and the stars.
Of course, I only learnt these details later, after I had spent my last hours in Switzerland alternately bored and fuming, a tiny cog in a vast mechanism. I was part of the atomic clock, a temporal tourist at best, a life of electromagnetic transitions in atoms of caesium. We do n
ot, after all, run the world with our beautiful ticking discs. My watchmaker Christian Bresser may have felt he was playing God, but what a delusion that was. It wasn’t the Sun around the Earth, it was the Earth around the Sun.
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1 Reading the first draft of this chapter, my editor made a simple note in the margin: ‘How is this even possible?’ The answer lies in the tiny screws, springs, plates, wheels and jewels, but also in the weights on the edge of the balance wheel, the ratchets that mediate the power supply, the interconnected barrels that create an energy reserve, and the pallet fork attached to the escapement wheel that causes the ticking sound. The greatest wonder of all is that this is a mechanical movement, much of it adapted from pocket watches created in the seventeenth century. The precision tooling and some of the fitting may be done by machine, but the design and final assembly are done by brain and hand. In all the talk of the absurd cost of these timepieces, and the ingenious madness of the gimmickry, one is often left dumbstruck by the beauty of the engineering. ‘How is this even possible’ indeed.
2 Historically the task becomes a little easier. There was, after all, an Abraham Louis Breguet (1747–1843), born in Switzerland and apprenticed in France. And there was Antoni Patek, a Pole, who met the Frenchman Adrien Philippe in 1845 and formed a company six years later. But there is no Monsieur Hublot, for example, and no Mr Rolex (or at least not in the realms of horology; it’s marketing, like Häagen-Dazs).
3 In its catalogue of 1900, in which pocket watches were offered from £3 to £250, Smith & Sons claimed that ‘Its lifetime, in comparison with the Swiss, is treble.’ It made a special point of its ‘non-magnetizable watches’, which would not be in any way affected, as others have ‘all too sadly’ proven to be, when exposed to railway travel or any proximity to electricity.
4 The tourbillon mounted the escapement and balance wheel in a rotating cage, thus limiting the detrimental effects of gravity on performance.
5 Switzerland’s military engagement effectively ceased with the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, but during the revolutionary period production was hugely disrupted.
6 But of course nothing will ever explain the cuckoo clock.
7 UTC is composed of International Atomic Time (a scale composed of the readings of about 400 atomic clocks around the world) coordinated with Universal Time or Solar Time, which is based on the Earth’s rotation. UTC is the time standard accepted by most countries in the world and is maintained at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) in Sèvres, France. It stands as official legal time, an important standard to have, when, for example, your insurance policy renews or expires.
8 It also included this advice: ‘Manual intervention may be required on some cesium and rubidium atomic frequency standards, as well as some quartz standards . . . Historically, leap second changes have created significant operational problems. All coordinated time scales will be affected by this adjustment.’
Roger Bannister: at the end of the race lay the start of the story.
Chapter Eight
Roger Bannister Goes Round and Round
In the 1970s I won an end-of-year form prize at my school in Hampstead, and my reward was a £10 book token to spend on any book I fancied.
My prize was to be presented on Speech Day, a sub-Etonian tradition in which we all had to wear cricket trousers and sit in the main hall through interminable accounts of the sports teams and drama department and staggering Oxbridge success, and in which everyone you hated got a prize presented from someone you’d never heard of. This person usually had only the most tenuous link to the school and always spoke about the challenges of life ahead and making lemonade. In an effort to impress my mother and the school and the prize-giver on the day, I went to the local bookshop and chose The Jews in the Roman World by Michael Grant, a volume I’m yet to open, let alone read. I don’t think anyone was impressed, least of all the prize-giver, who was the school old boy Roger Bannister.
But obviously I was impressed with him. Bannister was not one of the boring speakers I had feared, but a true old boy, and a Boy’s Own hero. He had been a legend for almost 20 years, and although I can’t remember if he spoke that afternoon about his sub-four-minute mile (maybe just in passing; he was probably sick of it, and everyone knew the story pretty well), he was by far the most famous person I had ever met, if you can call a handshake a meeting. Forty years later I met him again, and at that point he was only talking about it, four minutes of once-fluid time that had been frozen, stretched, amplified, revised, memorised and mythologised. In the years since he broke the record in 1954, many people had run the mile a lot faster. The difference between him and the ones who came after was that his run was timeless.
At our second encounter, Bannister was promoting his new autobiography Twin Tracks at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival. It was 60 years since his astonishing run on a track by the Iffley Road, Oxford, but for our benefit he was still breasting the tape. ‘Somehow I had to run that last lap in 59 seconds . . . time seemed to stand still, or did not exist. The only reality was the next 200 yards of track under my feet. The tape meant finality, extinction even.’
He was speaking at the Methodist Church Hall. When the event was over I asked him how he felt about living the same four minutes repeatedly; I could think of no one else in a similar position in any field.1 He said he had long tried battling against it. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘I would rather have been known also for my achievements as a researcher,’ but he was now content. ‘I don’t think many people had the life I’ve enjoyed for four minutes’ work!’ He was joking about the four minutes’ work. He had become obsessed about the time, and it had dominated his life for two years.2
Everyone gasped and delighted at Bannister’s story, for it was still one of those tales that took to the air like a Spitfire. The thrill lay in the amateurism of the whole effort, and the tang of the Pathé newsreel. He spoke of how he had trained in his lunch hour to knock 3.7 seconds off his previous best mile, and how, because he was working as a doctor at St Mary’s, Paddington, he did an early shift on the day of the race, before boarding a train to the meet at Oxford on his own. He remembered how, worried about the force of the wind only 30 minutes before race time, he wondered whether the record should be attempted at all; he recalled his pacing partners Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway becoming increasingly impatient with him. And then there was the wonder of the Tannoy announcement from his friend Norris McWhirter: ‘Result of Event Eight – One Mile. First, R.G. Bannister of Exeter and Merton Colleges, in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new Track Record, British Native Record, British All-Comers Record, European Record, Commonwealth Record and World Record . . . Three minutes . . .’ and the 3,000 spectators drowning out the rest of the time with cheers.3 The time was 3 minutes 59.4 seconds.
The most intriguing thing about Bannister’s timing was psychological. Runners had been trying to beat the four-minute barrier for decades before Bannister and his chums came along, and every few years they drew a little closer. Walter George had run 4:12 and ¾ in London in 1886, a record no one believed would be broken. In 1933, New Zealander Jack Lovelock ran 4:07.6 at Princeton. During the war the pace increased dramatically, as if it was now or never: in July 1943 the Swede Arne Andersson managed 4:02.6 in Gothenburg, and a year later in Malmö hit 4:01.6. A year after that Gunder Hägg, another Swede, also running in Malmö, achieved 4:01.3, and there the record stood until Roger Bannister sharpened his spikes almost nine years later. When Bannister arrived in Oxford for the big race, several athletes would have been wishing him ill, believing that 1954 was their year instead, not least the American Wes Santee and the Australian John Landy (both were clearly upset when reporters rushed to tell them that Bannister had beaten them to it).
But the strange thing was, once Bannister had done it, they all could do it. Landy ran an astonishing 3:57.9 in Turku less than seven weeks later. Bannister then ran another sub-4 minutes in Vancouver, and the f
ollowing year Laszlo Tabori, Chris Chataway and Brian Hewson all ran under 4 minutes in London. By 1958, the record was held by Herb Elliott of Australia with 3:54.5, and by 1966 American Jim Ryun managed 3:51.3. In July 1981 Sebastian Coe ran 3:48.53 in Zurich, but his time was beaten only a week later in Koblenz by his great middle-distance rival Steve Ovett with 3:48.4. Two days after that, in Brussels, Coe reclaimed the record with 3:47.33. In July 1999 the Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj ran 3:43.13, and there it stands, yet to be broken, as surely one day it will. The current record, explained by a combination of improved diet, stricter training at altitude and physical constitution, would have left Bannister about 120 yards behind at the finish.4
This is half of the story of sport, of course. A limit is reached, a limit is exceeded; what seems impossible one year is suddenly possible every year after. Norris and Ross McWhirter’s efforts at The Guinness Book of Records and associated television programmes were predicated on such improvements. Before sport became a subject for record books, there was just the realisation that humans (upright, no tail) were rather slow compared to things they tried to catch: the kangaroo managed 45 mph, the cheetah 85 mph, the spine-tailed swift 220 mph. Before steam and motorisation, humans probably managed about 35 mph on ice sledges and horses. For a while the fastest human by accident was probably Frank Ebrington, the occupant of an uncoupled carriage as it sped down the Kingstown–Dalkey (vacuum-pumped) atmospheric railway near Dublin, at an estimated speed of 84 mph in 1843. The first to exceed 100 mph were the crews testing the Siemens & Halske electric engine on a track near Berlin in 1901. While the fastest humans in history were the crew of Apollo 10 on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere: 24,791 mph.
Roger Bannister was running at an average of 15 mph. But Bannister’s four minutes had another brilliant layer on top of the speed: the time itself. Four minutes was a perfect time for those not terribly interested in sport – long enough to keep you hooked, not so long that you got bored. A mile in four minutes was something we could feasibly imagine running ourselves, even though everyone before Bannister had failed to do so. Four minutes was the length of a 78 rpm record, or a long pop song, or, today, a view on YouTube without major commitment.