The Clock-makers' Company is still in existence; although now, of course, it has developed into a society like the ordinary modern association of manufacturers. Under pressure of change and competition, English manufacturers were compelled unwillingly to change their system of production, but the character of the watches they would not change. The same country which had made so many of the mechanical inventions finally settled down into satisfaction with its models at a time when other nations were continuing to make improvements, as, for example, when they clung to the fusee after watchmakers abroad had found a better substitute.
The English watch has remained heavy, substantial, and reliable; it is an excellent mechanism produced regardless of expense. Such a watch cannot be made cheaply, least of all by British methods. There has been something obstinate in the maker's attitude; if the law of supply and demand called for something different, so much the worse for the law. The English have been slow to see the possibilities in the cheap watch. They have not realized that a watch need not be expensive in order to keep good time. They started to put the watch into universal use, but left to other nations the completion of the process.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
What Happened in France and Switzerland
Across the English Channel lives a race of a very different character. The French are people of highly adaptable minds; often they see possibilities in the inventions of other nations which those other nations have failed themselves to see. The automobile was first made in the United States, but the French soon developed it into something that was better than our early clumsy cars, and we were years in overtaking them. The Wright Brothers first learned the secret of aerial flight, and then Wilbur Wright sailed for France, where the people went wild with enthusiasm over the idea of flying; it was in France that aviation really became what it is to-day.
The French have always been fine mechanics and finished workmen. It was to be expected that they would do something artistic and interesting with the manufacture of timepieces. They could not make a better watch than the British were turning out toward the end of the eighteenth century. Nobody could—but they could make it more beautiful. In Shakespeare's time and afterward, while watches were still more valuable as works of art than they could be as timepieces, the richest work of this nature was done in France. There watches were made in the form of mandolins and other musical instruments, in the form of flowers, in the form of jeweled butterflies, and in wonderful cases, painted and enameled and engraved. In the J. Pierpont Morgan collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, there is a watch which, in 1800, on the fete-day after the battle of Marengo, Napoleon Bonaparte gave to Murat, who was his brother-in-law and one of his generals. On the back cover of this watch appears a miniature portrait of Napoleon himself. And since he himself was the author of the gift, one may assume that it represented the Great Emperor's own conception of himself.
The wrist-watch, to-day a military necessity, was at first a French idea. It is interesting to learn that the merchants and makers of this kind of work were in their own time called neither watchmakers nor horologists, but toymen. There again is shown the old idea about watches; they were not timepieces but toys.
Later on, toward the end of the period of invention, when first, the clock, and soon afterward, the watch, had become fairly accurate timekeepers, the French makers again took the lead in the same way; once more they beautified what they could not practically improve. The French clocks of the period of Louis XIV and his successors are celebrated for their design. One might easily suppose, from an examination of the great modern collections of rare and precious watches in our museums that the French had been the leading watchmakers of the world, for the specimens there found being selected chiefly for beauty or value from the collector's point of view, are oftener of French than of any other make. Yet it must not be supposed that the French made no inventions. The credit for some of the important improvements is disputed between the English, French and Swiss, and it is not always easy to decide which nation has the better claim. Furthermore, certain of the French watchmakers came from Switzerland while at various times, some of those in France moved to England, especially during the reign of Terror. The distinctions are somewhat confused and we can only speak in a general way.
However, while the watchmaking industry was developing in France, it gave forth a seed which took root in new soil. In the hill country of eastern France, in the town of Autun, there lived a watchmaker named Charles Cusin. One day, in 1574, for reasons that we do not know, he moved a few miles eastward across the border into Switzerland and there settled in the beautiful lake city of Geneva. He probably had no thought that this personal act of a private citizen would have an effect upon history, but an industry employing thousands of people and making millions of dollars worth of goods can be traced back to the time when he crossed the border.