I do not remember the first time I thought a watch or clock was remarkably beautiful. Perhaps all mechanisms, dials, numbers, and polished metal can be aesthetically positive. But clock faces are entirely different for me, and have always been. Then, one day, I saw how they worked. I witnessed a skeleton movement, in which the beating heart and secondary movements that normally lay underneath the functional hands and dials are exposed, rendering the watch both dysfunctional through the removal of numbers and static reference points, and beautiful in its wild complexity. My lover affair has sent me to the outer limits of horologie to admire million-dollar watches. But more than the visual appreciation, my love is philosophical, charged with history and irony, and no little bit of testosterone.
Clocks were not always built to measure the passage of mere time. Original clock faces indicated 24 hours in a circle, and the hands were thought to track the actual movement of the sun around the earth. Some clocks also tracked the movement of the other planets and the moon. Ideally, the hands of the clock pointed directly at the position of the moon, Saturn, or Jupiter. The hubris of this mechanical terracentricity is only matched by the physical beauty of these objects, constructed by princes out of the most malleable, and so the most expensive, metals, or else built into babel towers that redefined the city.
This is to say that mechanical time-keeping devices have always been objects of beauty, produced by exceptional craftsmen who wish to showcase their skill, and at great expense by those who wish to demonstrate their wealth. By contrast, the only widespread predecessor to the mechanical clock was the sun clocks, such as a sun dial, which were easily crafted from any available material and relied on raw nature - instead of ingeniously shaped natural phenomena, such as springs - to function. The sand-clocks, like an hour glass, were themselves prized possessions of those able to afford expert glass-workers, and even so were only available some fifty years before mechanical clocks, and then only in Italy. So be it resolved that mechanical clocks are unique objects of art and craft.
Let me describe the operation of a mechanical clock. First there is a drive train - some thing that creates kinetic energy. Not much energy is needed, only enough to suspend and move the weight of the hands around the face. The most simple is a falling weight on a rope, such as with early bell-tower clocks. A coiled spring set to bouncing and returning has also been popular. Both must be wound by people at intervals, or, as with modern watches, using the kinetic energy of normal wrist movement. Oh, or electricity via batteries.
Second, the energy must be carefully regulated using a 'regulator' (surprise!). That is a pendulum, or a sort of paddle-wheel thing, or this really cool thing called a grasshopper. Basically, the energy from the 'drive' is sent through a gear, which is stopped and started by the back and forth of, say, a pendulum. It goes unsaid that the rate of that moderation, and thus the length and weight of that pendulum, is under careful scrutiny. Watches use this cool weighted, spinning wheel around the circular, bouncing spring.
The drive and regulation is the really cool, important part. Once you have regulated kinetic energy, the world is your oyster. Using ingenious systems of gears, horologists can spin hands around several faces at once, seconds and hours, or once a day, or once a month, or something that chimes. Everything else is a game on the relationship between drive and regulation.
A particularly remarkable development is the Tourbillon, which was developed in 1795 in Switzerland, where a competition to make the most complicated and insane mechanical devices is part of the ambient culture. It was developed to counteract the millisecond of inaccuracy theoretically possible when super high-end watches experience extreme temperature changes. Yeah, its pretty ridiculous. Basically, the mainspring is not only encased in a regulating wheel, the whole darn thing spins so as to average out the impact of gravity and metal expansion. Today, they can spin on three axes. Let us agree that all clocks are monuments to engineers, and are mechanical showpieces. But some are made in factories, while others are handcrafted by millionaire masters at the rate of one per ten years.
In addition to the mechanical awesomeness is the philosophical meaning, which I have premeditated. The original function of clocks, to track celestial bodies, is the definition of ego. The term 'regulate' is a big part of horological jargon, as if a terrestrial device could accurately reflect - let alone impact - time itself. Watches up the ante by placing this device on a person's wrist, next to the buttons of his cuff or the clasp of her bracelet. It is jewelry, in the accessories section of Target next to the sunglasses. They are simultaneously common and extraordinary.
And they are beautiful. The craftsmen who make these are like architects, or graphic designers, or industrial designers. They produce functional objects of beauty. Objects that are at once gaudy and subtle, playful and formal, ironic and literal.
Visit the blog I link to on the sidebar, watchismo.com, or the website of independent horologie to see some examples of what extraordinary watches look like. Search 'tourbillon' or 'regulator' or 'Vaceron Constantin' on youtube. Fall in love.
935. Andy.
A watch sculpture, by the Swiss group Trois C, highlighting the mainspring and weighted wheel regulator (aka 'escapement').
Vacheron Constantin's Tour de l'Ile showing off - 24 independent functions, 10,000 parts, $1.5 million (and totally unavailable), 250 years of watchmaking.
One of the most complicated watches ever made, Breguet's Marie Antoinette pocket watch, commissioned in 1783 and completed in 1827 (the original client noticeably absent).
Despite or because of their simplicity, RGM in Lancaster, PA, produces the watches that I most enjoy looking at.
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