Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

The delighted lad began to take the delicate mechanism apart, studying carefully each wheel and spring and lever until he felt that he understood exactly how it should work. Then, when he had succeeded in reassembling the parts and in making the watch tick bravely once more, he was seized with a great ambition to build another one all by himself.

After many experiments with his crude locksmith tools, he did produce a watch which would run and which would tell time after a fashion—the first watch ever made in the Neuchatel district—but it did not satisfy his artist's soul and he realized that he must have better tools.

Somebody told him that there was in Geneva a machine for cutting wheels, and he set out to see it for himself, only to come back sadly disappointed. Wherever he asked to see the machine, the canny Geneva craftsmen shook their heads. This eager lad from another town had far too intelligent a face to be allowed to learn the precious secrets. The most that they would do was to let him have a few of the wheels made by the machine.

Then he began to work out for himself a machine to cut the wheels, and at last succeeded in the task, so that before long he was well on the way to becoming a watch manufacturer. Richard, however, was generous with his ideas; he instructed a number of the young men of his district, so that watchmaking soon began to flourish in his town and in those about it.

We have now seen how the watchmaking industry became established in two great centers—in Geneva, where the highest quality was maintained, but under the rule of the guild, which did not encourage quantity of output, and in the Neuchatel region where no guild system existed. In the course of time this latter region overtook and passed in quantity of output that of Geneva. By 1818, the Neuchatel district of the Jura was turning out watches at the rate of 130,000 a year.

The solid old Geneva watchmakers criticized their rivals as being less exacting in quality and less careful as to the standard of gold used in their cases, but the Neuchatel people had no difficulty in finding customers; we read that one hundred and forty of their merchants went twice a year to the Leipsig fair, where they sometimes sold watches to the value of four million francs ($800,000) in a year.

The two principal centers of Swiss watchmaking have been mentioned although, of course, watches were made in other districts as well. It is easy to see that many generations ago it had already become a very large industry, and so we need not be surprised to learn that even to-day the tiny inland country produces a larger annual export value of watches than even our vast United States. Watchmaking has been so large a source of wealth that the Swiss government has aided it in every way, including the establishment of schools and courses for training skilled workmen. More than sixty thousand Swiss people are directly employed in the Swiss watch industry and over three hundred thousand, or one-twelfth of the entire population, are indirectly connected with it. The Swiss have also made many inventions and improvements so that they have had much to do with the development of the watch itself as well as with the industry.

As we have already seen, it was a Swiss who invented the fusee, another who introduced the use of jewels for reducing friction and the stemwind is also of Swiss origin. It was the Swiss, too, who, early in the nineteenth century, did away with the solid upper plate which covered the works and used, instead, a system of bridges. The bridge form of movement allows each part to be repaired or adjusted separately and to-day it is to be found in all watches of the higher grades.

The Swiss invention of the fusee, described in Chapter VIII, played an important part for several hundred years, but at last it was replaced by something simpler and still more effective. Made to equalize the difference in the pressure exerted by a stiff mainspring when first wound up and when partly run down, it worked beautifully but was rather clumsy; and it required comparatively heavier parts which naturally necessitated the use of greater power. Thus friction and, consequently, wear were increased. But the Swiss by making watch-parts that were very light but yet strong, and by reducing friction principally through the introduction of jewels into the mechanism, succeeded at last in getting a movement that could be run with very little power. So they now could use a weak and slender mainspring, made so long that only its middle part ever was wound and unwound, and thus the pressure remained equal, and the use of the fusee was no longer necessary. This principle, called the "going barrel" construction, reduced friction, and made the thin modern watch a possibility. The American makers, as we shall presently see, adopted the "going barrel" construction practically from the first. They had no traditional prejudices, and they knew a good mechanical idea when they saw it.