A proportionate part of Mr. Wood's interesting volume is devoted to the smaller subject of watches. The invention of the coiled spring as a motive power instead of the weight used in clocks seems to have taken place in 1477, at Nuremberg, where watches were first made, and called, from their oval shape, Nuremberg eggs. In 1530. we find Charles V., in his retirement at the monastery of St. Yuste, amusing himself with "portable clocks;" reflecting: "How foolish I was to have squandered so much blood and treasure to make men think alike, when I can't even make a few watches keep uniform time;" and good naturedly observing, when a monk overthrew them all: "I have been laboring for some time to make these watches go together, and now you have effected it in one instant." This emperor possessed one watch that was made "in the jewel or collet of his ring," so that diminutiveness of construction must have been rapidly attained. George III., however, had a repeating watch presented to him (by Arnold of Devereux Court, in the Strand) whose size did not exceed that of a silver twopenny-piece. "It contained one hundred and twenty different parts, but altogether weighed not more than five pennyweights, seven grains and three-fourths. ... For this delicate and exquisite specimen of his art, Arnold had to make nearly all the tools used in its manufacture. This tiny watch contained the first ruby cylinder ever made, The king presented Arnold with five hundred guineas; and when the Emperor of Russia offered a thousand guineas for a similar one, the watchmaker refused to make it lest he should depreciate the value of his gift."
Sir John Dick Lauder possesses a skull-watch that belonged to Mary Queen of Scots; this is of silver gilt, and ornamented with representations of death between the palace and the cottage; the garden of Eden, and the crucifixion; the holy family at Bethlehem, etc. The works are as brains in the skull, the hollow of which is filled by a silver bell; the dial-plate being on a flat upon the roof of the mouth. With reference to this ghastly subject, Mr. Wood relates that, in a French engraving of 1830, death enters a watchmaker's shop, and shows his hour-glass to the master, saying: "Vais-je bien?" to which the latter answers: "Vous avancez horriblement." Many persons addicted to the science of watchmaking seem, indeed, to have been on unusually familiar terms with the king of terrors; and some have left epitaphs behind them of a very characteristic nature. In the churchyard of Lydford, in Devonshire, is to be read the following:
"Here lies in a horizontal position,
the outside case of
George Rautleigh, watchmaker,
whose abilities in that line were an honor to his profession.
Integrity was the mainspring, and prudence the
regulator of all the actions of his life;
Humane, generous, and liberal, his hand never
stopped till he had relieved distress;
So nicely regulated was his movements,
that he never went wrong,
except when set-agoing by people who did not know his key;
Even then he was easily set right again.
He had the art of disposing of his time so well,
That his hours glided away in one
continual round of pleasure and delight,
Till an unlucky moment put a period to his existence.
He departed this life November 14, 1802,
Aged 57, wound up.
In hopes of being taken in hand by his Maker;
And of being thoroughly cleaned, repaired, and
set-agoing for the world to come."
Of course, watches could not be made to imitate the feats of the Strasburg clock; but in the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg there is a watch which was made by a Russian peasant, named Kulubin, in the reign of Catharine II., which is sufficiently wonderful. It is about the size of an egg, and contains a representation of the tomb of Christ, with the Roman sentinels. On pressing a spring, the stone is rolled from the tomb, the sentinels fall down, the angels appear, the holy women enter the sepulchre, and the same chant which is sung in the Greek Church on Easter eve is accurately performed.
The most costly and elaborate watch ever produced by British workmen, up to 1844, was made in that year by Hart & Son of Cornhill, for the Sultan Abdul Medschid; the brilliancy of its colors and exquisiteness of its pencilling seem to have surpassed anything of the kind of foreign manufacture. It struck the hours and quarters by itself, and repeated them with the minutes upon pressing a small gold slide; and the sound, produced by wires instead of a bell, resembled that of a powerful and harmonious cathedral clock. Its price was one thousand two hundred guineas.
The most accurately exact watch is probably Mr. Benson's Chronograph, used for timing the Derby. "It consists of an ordinary quick train lever movement, on a scale sufficiently large to carry the hands for an eight-inch dial, and with the addition of a long seconds-hand, which traverses the dial, instead of being, as usual, just above the figure VI. The peculiarity of the chronograph consists in this seconds-hand and the mechanism connected with it. The hand itself is double, or formed of two distinct hands, one lying over the other. The lower one, at its extreme end, is furnished with a small cup or reservoir, with a minute orifice at the bottom. The corresponding extremity of the upper hand is bent over so as to rest exactly over this puncture, and the reservoir having been filled with ink of a thickness between ordinary writing fluid and printer's ink, the chronograph is ready for action. The operator, who holds tightly grasped in his hand a stout string connected with the mechanism peculiar to this instrument, keeps a steady lookout for the fall of the starter's flag. Simultaneously, therefore, with the start of the race, the string he holds is pulled by him, and at the same moment the upper hand dips down through the reservoir in the lower, and leaves a little dot or speck of ink upon the dial. This is repeated as the horses pass the winning-post, so that a lasting and indisputable record is afforded by the dots on the dial of the time—exact to the tenth of a second—which is occupied in running the race. As an example of the results of this instrument's operations, we may add that it timed the start and arrival of the Derby race in 1866 as follows: Start, 3 hours 34 min, 0 sec,; arrival, 3 hours 36 min. 49 sec.; duration of race, 2 min. 49 sec."
To give an idea of the extraordinary division of labor in this delicate science, it was stated in evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, that there are one hundred and two distinct branches of the art of watchmaking, and that the watch finisher, whose duty it is to put together the scattered parts, is the only one of the hundred and two persons who can work in any other department than his own. The hair-spring gives a very curious proof of the value that can be given to a small piece of steel by manual labor. Four thousand hair-springs scarcely weigh more than a single ounce, but often cost more than a thousand pounds. "The pendulum-spring of a watch, which governs the vibrations of the balance, costs, at the retail price, two-pence, and weighs three-twentieths of a grain; while the retail price of a pound of the best iron, the raw material out of which fifty thousand such springs are made, is the same sum of two-pence." Mr. Bennett—whose advocacy of female labor in the watch-trade has rendered him obnoxious to some persons—states that he found at Neufchâtel, where the Swiss watches are chiefly made, twenty thousand women employed upon the more delicate parts of the watch-movement.
The last part of this very interesting volume is devoted to that perfection of timekeepers, the chronometer, by which is found the longitude of a ship at sea. Twenty thousand pounds was offered by the British government for the invention of this instrument, which was awarded to John Harrison in 1765. His chronometer, in the first instance, was discredited on a voyage to Jamaica, since it differed with the chart by a degree and a half, but it was eventually discovered that it was the chart that was wrong. Of how accurately chronometers are made, there are numberless instances; here is one with which we must conclude. "After several months spent at sea," writes Dr. Arnott, "in a long passage from South America to Asia, my pocket-chronometer, and others on board, announced one morning that a certain point of land was then bearing north from the ship, at a distance of fifty miles. In an hour afterward, when a mist had cleared away, the looker-out on the mast gave the joyous call of 'Land ahead!' verifying the reports of the chronometers almost to one mile, after a voyage of thousands of miles. It is allowable at such a moment, with the dangers and uncertainties of ancient navigation before the mind, to exult in contemplating what man has now achieved. Had the rate of the wonderful little instrument in an that time quickened or slackened ever so slightly, its announcement would have been useless, or even worse; but in the night and in the day, in storm and in calm, in heat and in cold, its steady beat went on, keeping exact account of the rolling of the earth and stars; and in the midst of the trackless waves, which retain no mark, it was always ready to tell its magic tale, indicating the very spot on the globe over which it had arrived."