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Watchmaking: A Case Study in Enterprise and Change*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

David S. Landes
David S. Landes
Affiliation:
Professor of History, Harvard University
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Abstract

From its beginnings in sixteenth century southern Germany, Professor Landes traces the development of the personal timepiece industry to France, where the design of watches as items of personal adornment reached its peak; to England, where precision in timekeeping and rationalization of manufacture were developed to new heights; to Switzerland, where manufacture on a mass scale for a highly diverse market was attained; and, finally, to America, where the technique of assembling mechanical devices from precision-machined interchangeable parts was applied to watchmaking with the same success it had achieved in less demanding applications. He discusses the sociological factors that produced the Swiss industry in a region of seemingly little promise, and demonstrates how these factors made the Swiss more successful than the Germans, French, or English.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , Spring 1979 , pp. 1 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1979

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References

1 Note, however, that watch cases may be made of valuable materials: gold, platinum, precious stones. But these too are light in proportion to value and can easily bear the cost of transportation. The problem is not the cost of the transport itself, but the duties levied by governments. As a result, much of the watch trade has been in movements rather than complete watches, the movements being cased in the country of sale.

2 On these earliest clocks, and watches see Baillie, G. H., Watches: Their History, Decoration and Mechanism (London, 1929)Google Scholar, esp. chs. iii and iv; von Bassermann-Jordan, Ernst, Uhren (8th ed.; ed. von Bertele, Hans; Braunschweig, 1976), pp. 353 ff.Google Scholar; Cipolla, Carlo M., Clocks and Culture 1300–1700 (London, 1967), 48–49.Google Scholar Further on the invention of the mainspring and its technical consequences, Maurice, Klaus, Die deutsche Räderuhr (2 vols.; Munich, 1976), I, 78 et seq., esp. 81–85 and 87–91.Google Scholar

3 Much could be done also with time announcements by street criers. Compare the role of the muezzin in Muslim countries.

4 There are some excellent examples illustrated in Die Uhr: Zeitmesser und Schmuck in fünf Jahrhunderten [Ausstellung im Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim vom 10. Juni 1937 bis 16. Juli 1967] (Kornwestheim, 1967), 73, 76, 77, 81, 145.

5 The straight balance spring is usually attributed to Robert Hooke, the English mathematician and scientist; and the spiral, to Christian Huygens, the Dutch physicist. Huygens was also the inventor of the pendulum clock. On the role of natural scientists in the development of timekeeping instruments, see especially Defossez, L., Les savants du XVIIe siècle et la mesure du temps (Lausanne, 1946).Google Scholar

6 For an example of each of these, see Cuss, T. P. Camerer, The Camerer Cuss Book of Antique Watches (Antique Collectors' Club; n.p., 1976), 93, 94, 99.Google Scholar

7 The Puritan influence may have been important here. In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, British watchmakers began to produce timepieces completely devoid of ornament, to satisfy the demand of their Puritan clientele. These were not in themselves superior instruments of measurement to the more conventional watches produced at the time. On the other hand, they must surely have led the individual maker to try to differentiate his product by its quality as a timekeeper, for it served no other purpose; and it is no coincidence in my opinion that British makers continued, after the Restoration, to put some of their best work into absolutely plain cases. For an example of a Puritan watch, see Cuss, Antique Watches, 63.

8 Baillie, Watches, 199. Poetic exaggeration. Other countries continued to make and sell watches. But the British made the best, and the others learned from then.

9 Tompion's watches were characterized by the finest detail: polished, high-numbered pinions, beautifully cut wheels, and other fine points making for greater reliability and precision. Tompion is also said to have been the first to develop a systematic division of labor not only within his own shop, but also on a contract basis with others; and it may well be this that led him to introduce the practice of numbering his watches, for a number made it much easer to associate given parts with the particular watch they were intended for. See Symonds, R. W., Thomas Tompion, His Life and Work (London, 1951), esp. 237–238.Google Scholar

10 The earliest repeaters generally sounded the time to the last quarter-hour, but within about twenty years, the first half-quarter repeaters appeared.

11 The verge escapement was so called because of the “wand” or arbor to which were affixed the two pallets that stopped and released the successive teeth of the escape wheel. This was the earliest mechanical escapement, and although it could never achieve the highest degree of precision, its simplicity, solidity, and easy repairability kept it in use almost to the end of the nineteenth century — long after it had been superseded by more precise devices. The cylinder escapement, instead of pallets, used the walls of a cut-out cylinder, swinging to and fro on the balance arbor, to hold and release the successive projections (teeth) of the ᾽scape wheel.

The verge escapement was thought of as vertical because the escape wheel is at right angles to the plates, that is, it “stands up” between them. By contrast, the cylinder ᾽scape wheel lies parallel to the plates, hence the designation “horizontal.” From this point of view, almost all the later escapements of any importance were also to be horizontal, but the name was always reserved to the cylinder escapement.

Graham, incidentally, was also the inventor of the so-called dead-beat escapement (1715), which made possible the precise “regulator” pendulum clock and was to hold the field in the manufacture of precision clocks — for astronomical use, for example — for almost two hundred years.

12 The lever escapement was so-called because the arms holding the pallets that stop and release the ᾽scape wheel are pivoted at the fulcrum of a lever actuated by a projecting tooth or pin or roller attached to the balance arbor. In its perfected forms, it was not to be superseded until the invention of the nonmechanical watch (the Bulova accutron tuning-fork watch in the 1950s).

Strangely enough, the tuning-fork escapement was anticipated by Edward Brown ot the house of Breguet in Paris in the 1860s. He apparently applied it in a clock, with great success; and yet nothing ever came of it. See the account by Jung, Hermann F. in Reports of Artisans Selected by … the Society of Arts to Visit the Paris Universal Exhibition, 1867 (London, 1867), 354.Google Scholar This clock is now in the Musée International d'Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds; see their catalogue, Collections du Musée … (La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1974), p. 131, No. 337. But it is not working as intended.

13 Was this the only industry to contradict Warren Scoville's excessively benign view of the economic consequences of the Revocation? See his The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development 1680–1720 (Berkeley, 1960), esp. 360.

14 As we have seen, it had its virtues. When well made, it could keep fair time, and indeed verges continued to be made almost to the end of the nineteenth century, especially for undemanding rustics. The big cheap turnip of a watch that was made for this market was known among more “enlightened” users as a “farmer's watch” and was long decorated with scenes of rural life. For an example, see Camerer Cuss, Antique Watches, p. 218. He notes that country folk liked their watches heavy and tended to judge and pay for them by weight.

15 See the debate on this subject between Pierre Le Roy (brother of Julien), partisan of a conservative approach, and a Parisian maker named Godefroy, one of the first in France to use the cylinder escapement, in Le mercure de France, June 1752, pp. 141–149, and October 1752, pp. 133–143.

16 Readers of Treasure Island may perhaps recall the distinction that Long John Silver made between steering a course and setting one. That, he noted, was what separated the forecastle hands, however skilled, and the officers on the afterdeck.

17 In the early years, navigators were pleased to perform these computations in four hours. Practice and later improvements in the method cut this to about an hour — for a good reckoner. Crommelin, C. A., “The Introduction of the Marine Chronometer into Naval and Mercantile Use,” Bulletin of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, IV, No. 10 (October 1951), 404–405.Google Scholar

18 The Spanish and French governments also offered substantial prizes for the invention of an accurate means of measuring longitude. But the Spanish got nowhere, and the French, as we shall see, although making crucial technical contributions, saw the British make the most of them and ended by building their few chronometers on British lines.

19 The detent or chronometer escapement is so called because it works like a trigger (détente in French): a spring is pushed back with each to-and-fro movement of the balance wheel, releases a tooth of the ‘scape wheel, then springs back to hold the next tooth until this is released in its turn. The escapement thus minimizes contact between the wheel train and the balance, which is limited to the very brief moments of trigger action. Since this contact is a principal source of perturbation of regularity, the detent escapement proved far more precise in its action than any of its predecessors. Indeed it remained the most precise of portable mechanical escapements, for over a hundred years, not really to be displaced for maritime use until the introduction of the quartz timer after World War II.

20 Note that at the equator each second of time is equal to about a quarter of a nautical mile. Under the circumstances, a chronometer that lost only half a second a day could, at the end of a two-month voyage, be seven or eight miles off. But this is not the way timepieces ordinarily work. The deviations from an even rate generally occur in both directions; that is, the watch or clock will be fast one day, slow another; so that over an extended period of time, the variations tend to compensate one another, at least in part, and the cumulative deviation is ordinarily considerably less than the deviation per dav would lead one to suppose. Note also that the user of a chronometer would ordinarily know the rate of his instrument and factor its habitual gain or loss into his calculations of longitude.

21 We have no count of the production of detent timepieces. But if one mav infer quantity from the serial numbers of the major producers (Arnold Eamshaw, Brockbanks, Barraud, Pennington, Parkinson & Frodsham), we are talking of some four to five thousand instruments by 1815. Cf. Mercer, Vaudrey, John Arnold & Son, Chronometer Makers 1762–1843 (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Jagger, Cedric, Paul Philip Barraud: A Study of a Fine Chronometer Maker, and of His Relatives, Associates and Successors in the Family Business 1750–1929 (London, 1968)Google Scholar; and catalogues of Sotheby-Parke-Bernet and Christie's.

22 On the seemingly slow adoption of the marine chronometer and the persistent recourse to “lunars,” see Parry, John H., Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1971), 227–228Google Scholar; also Gould, Rupert T., The Marine Chronometer, Its History and Development (London, 1960), 131–132Google Scholar; and Sadler, D. H., Man Is Not Lost: A Record of Two Hundred Years of Astronomical Navigation with the Nautical Almanac 1767–1967 (National Maritime Museum. Royal Greenwich Observatory: H.M.S.O., 1968).Google Scholar A good boxed chronometer could cost $250 (£50) and more, a princely sum for a sea captain to pay out of pocket. But John Arnold was selling pocket chronometers in silver for £25 (even this was half a year's salary for a skilled worker), and he was the most expensive maker in the business.

Moreover some sea captains were not above using a pocket watch for routine estimates of position. My own sense is that “lunars” went out faster than has been thought. Mercer, John Arnold & Son, 133.

23 Cf. Bailey, F. A. and Barker, T. C., “The Seventeenth-Century Origins of Watchmaking in South-West Lancashire,” in Harris, J. R., ed., Liverpool and Merseyside (Liverpool, 1969), pp. 1–15Google Scholar; Aikin, J., A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round Manchester (London, 1795), pp. 310–312Google Scholar; Barker, T. C. and Harris, J. R.. A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution St. Helens 1750–1900 (Liverpool, 1954), pp. 126–128.Google Scholar

24 Campbell, R., The London Tradesman (London, 1747), 252.Google Scholar

25 On Swiss forgeries, see Camerer Cuss, Antique Watches, 22. He points out that watches copied from English and Dutch designs were already available in Switzerland at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and he concludes: “The ability of the Swiss to imitate and the willingness to sign a watch with whatever name was required renders it difficult to determine the quantities of both eighteenth and nineteenth century watches which were in fact produced in Switzerland.”

26 The push of French watchmakers in the direction of thinness, even at the expense of quality, may also reflect a reaction against the extraordinary cumbersomeness of the French onion watch during the period 1675–1725. See, on this trade of accuracy for style, an article by Pierre Le Roy in the form of a “Lettre à Monsieur N.*** de l'Académie des Sciences de Bordeaux …” in the Mercure de France, June 1752, pp. 141–149.

Cf. also the boast, in the same journal in 1755, of Pierre-Augustin Caron (better known later as Beaumarchais), inventor of a new escapement: “By means of the doublevirgule escapement I can make watches as thin as anyone could want [aussi plates qu'on le juge à propos]; flatter than anyone has yet made, without sacrificing quality.” Le Mercure, 16 June 1755, cited by Elie-François Wartmann, “Notice historique sur les inventions et les perfectionnements faits à Genève dans le champ de l'industrie et dans celui de la medicine,” in Geneva, Société des Arts, Bulletin de la Classe d'Industrie et de Commerce, No. 101 p. 38 n. 1. This inventory by Caron had no direct consequences, partly because the double virgule was a difficult escapement to make and maintain in use, partly because Caron gave up watchmaking for the life of courtier and playwright.

27 The best source is Chapiro, Adolphe, “Jean-Antoine Lépine, 1720–1814, an ‘Unknown’ Maker,” Antiquarian Horology, IX, 4 (September 1975), 443–454.Google Scholar If the fusee is eliminated, the mainspring drives the wheel train directly by turning the barrel in which it is housed, which is geared into the second wheel. Hence the name “going barrel.”

28 There is a considerable literature on Breguet and his work. The most valuable source is the most recent book, by Daniels, George, The Art of Breguet (London, 1974).Google Scholar See also SirSalomons, David Lionel, Breguet (1747–1823) (London, 1923).Google Scholar

29 Davenport, C. E., ed., A Diary of the French Revolution by Gouverneur Morris (London, 1939), pp. xxxiii–xxxvi.Google Scholar I owe this delicious reference to my colleague Patrice Higonnet. Since reading it, I have come across another discussion of this exchange: Jas. Gibbs, W., “George Washington's Watch,” Bulletin of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, XV, No. 55 (Dec. 1971), 12–13.Google Scholar The watch is on display at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

30 This escapement was invented in its first form by J. B. Dutertre in Paris (1720s); and another Frenchman, the aforementioned Pierre Le Roy, improved it in 1750. But both these versions were experimental, and the French did nothing with the duplex until they borrowed it back from the English in the early nineteenth century. This, as we have seen, is not the only example of this kind (see above, the discussion of the chronometer escapement): in the eighteenth century, the British were not only quick to invent, but quick to exploit the inventions of others.

31 The earliest example of the rack lever known to us is — once again! — in the form of a design by a French maker, the Abbé de Hautefeuille, in 1722. It is not clear that Hautefeuille's invention ever found expression in an actual watch.

32 On the Swiss industry in general, the best sources are Pfleghart, A., Die schweizerische Uhrenindustrie, ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und Organisation (Leipzig, 1908)Google Scholar; and Jacquet, Eugène and Chapuis, Alfred, Techniques and History of the Swiss Watch (Berne, 1933).Google Scholar On Geneva, see Babel, A., Les metiers de l'ancienne Genève: histoire corporative de l'horlogerie, de l'orfèvrerie et des industries annexes (Geneva, 1916).Google Scholar On the mountain industry, see Daveau, Suzanne, Les régions frontalières de la montagne jurassienne: étude de géographie humaine (Lyons, 1959)Google Scholar; also a typescript by François Jequier of the University of Lausanne, “L'horlogerie du Jura: évolution des rapports de deux industries frontalières des origines au début du XIXe siècle,” in Frontières et contacts de civilisation, Actes du Colloque franco-suisse d'histoire, Besançon, et Neuchâtel, 4–8 October 1977 (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1979) — in press.Google Scholar

33 The latter outcome is not probable. In Protestant areas the upland Swiss reacted to population pressure by a wide variety of expedients, in particular by an energetic (enthusiastic?) recourse to home industry as a supplementary and principal source of income. See the classic study of Braun, Rudolf, Industrie und Volksleben (2 vols.; Erlenbach-Zürich and Stuttgart: Eugen Rentsch, 1964)Google Scholar and 1965) on the textile manufacture in the Zürich highlands. Or listen to the remarks of the traveler-essayist Charles-Victor von Bonstetten, writing of the straw-plaiting industry in the Freiburg area: “The women plait when they stand, when they walk, when they sit; they plait in the courtroom, when they stand before the high bailiff (Landvogt); they must go to sleep plaiting.” Cited by Hauser, Albert, Schweizerische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Erlenbach-Zürich and Stuttgart, 1961), 153.Google Scholar

34 “Report on the Commerce and Manufactures of Switzerland,” in Parliamentary Papers, 1836, XLV, p. 14. Bowring also points out (p. 12), however, that some 50,000 rough movements (ébauches) were exported from France to Switzerland annually, most of these presumably by the Japy factory at Beaucourt, to be worked up there into finished watches (more on Japy below). What share this represented of total Swiss exports into France is hard to say, the more so as a good part of the trade was illicit — not so much because the duty was too high (10 per cent on gold watches, 6 per cent on silver), but because the delays for assay and punchmarking were costly and vexatious. The French have always been strong on nontariff barriers to trade.

35 The Clockmakers' Company appointed a committee in 1814 to look into the “illicit introduction of foreign clocks and watches.” See the minute book, Clockmakers' Co. Library. MS 2728. Also documents concerning the marketing of watch cases, 1810—1812, ibid., MS 3940, 88–134.

36 Dent, Edward J., An Abstract from Two Lectures on the Construction and Management of Chronometers, Watches and Clocks (London, 1842), 6–7.Google Scholar It is ironic that, at the time that Dent was penning these lines, a certain Jules Jürgensen, son of a leading Danish watchmaker, was producing at Le Lode in Switzerland lever watches as good as any English maker could make — and this, in spite of the fact that they had no fusee to equalize the force of the mainspring as it wound down. To be sure, Jürgensen's watches were expensive, hardly the kind intended to undercut the British in their home market. On the other hand, there were many others who were producing in large quantity and for lower prices, while incorporating such elements as compensation for temperature, jeweled bearings, and other features of a high-quality watch. On the history of the Jürgensen firm: Kalish, Charles, “La dynastic des Jürgenson: trois siècles d'horlogerie dans deux pays.” La Suisse horlogère et Revue internationale d'horlogerie, (1963, no. 2), 45–56Google Scholar; (no. 3), 37–48.

37 On Japy's work, see Girod, Francois, “Un précurseur: Frédéric Japy (1749–1812),” Association Nationale des Collectionneurs et Amateurs d'Horlogerie Ancienne, No. 14 (May 1975), 32–48Google Scholar; DrMuston, , Histoire d'un village, II (Montbéliard, 1882)Google Scholar, passim. This latter source has some useful information, mixed in with a lot of nonsense.

38 British ébauches were, if anything, even less standardized. On the inadequacies of “mass-produced” rough movements from Lancashire, see a talk by a MrBickley, on “The Present System of the English Watch Manufacture,” The Horological Journal, XXII (1879–1880), 128.Google Scholar

39 This would have been an important advance in the direction of general interchangeability, though not the whole story. Ingold's immediate aim was to speed up production and cut costs by 30 per cent: the prospectus of “The National Company for the Manufacture of Watches” (1842), presumably optimistic, spoke of an output of 200–300 watch movements per day — that is, 60–90,000 a year, at a time when the larger merchant-manufacturers were finishing about a thousand a year. To be sure, his machinery was powered by foot treadles, and operatives would have had to spend much of their time in changing tools and setting the highly versatile chuck. Yet the ingenious use of guides and indexes made possible accurately repetitive work, and the portion of time devoted to drilling and cutting would surely have increased with learning. Besides, it was his conception that was the breakthrough; the path of further improvement was obvious, so that it would have taken perhaps another generation of machines to achieve full interchangeability. The best source on Ingold's life and technical contributions is the article by Carrington, R. F. and R. W., “Pierre Frédéric Ingold and the British Watch and Clockmaking Company,” Antiquarian Horology, X No. 6 (Spring 1978), 698–714.Google Scholar

40 There is a recollection of. the circumstances in remarks by G. William Frodsham of Parkinson & Frodsham at a meeting of the Society of Arts in London on May 19, 1886. The remarks are given in indirect discourse:

“Reference had been made to an English company which did not succeed in consequence of the opposition of Parliament; but this was, no doubt, owing to the fact that in those days there was a strong prejudice, more particularly on the part of the workmen, against the introduction of the machines designed by Mr. Ingold, so much so that at one time this gentleman went in fear of his life, and no doubt the views entertained by the watchmakers and workmen influenced members of Parliament, who of course, had no technical views upon the subject.” “The Mechanical Art of American Watchmaking,” Journal of the Society of Arts, XXXIV, No. 1 (May 21, 1886), 749.

Further on the Ingold affair, see the petitions and letters in the library of the Clock-makers' Company, Guildhall, London, MS 3943, 6–16.

41 These figures are from Church, R. A., “Nineteenth-Century Clock Technology in Britain, the United States, and Switzerland,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXXIII (1975), 618, 625.Google Scholar

42 Report by Mr. Herries, Bern, August 30, 1857, in Accounts and Papers, XXIII: Trade of Various Countries: Switzerland. Parliamentary Tapers, 1857–58, LV, p. 49.

43 On the history of Swiss competition, see Jaquet and Chapuis, Technique and History of the Swiss Watch, 173–179, 187–195.

44 The French came to the same conclusion, and their reborn industry in the Besançon area went over to lever-escapement pocket chronometers by the end of the century. On this question, see Rodanet, A. H., “Rapport sur la question: définition du chronomètre genre d'échappement qu'il comporte,” in Exposition Universelle de 1900, Congrès International de Chronométrie, 1900, Comptes-rendus des travaux (eds., Fichot, E. and de Vanssay, P.; Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1902), 34–39.Google Scholar

45 See, on the relative performance of different escapements and balance springs, the competition results as published in the Journal suisse d'horlogerie, passim, e.g., II (1877–1878), 204. Also Wartmann, Elie, “Rapport sur l'horlogerie suisse à l'Exposition Universelle de Paris, en 1867,” in Geneva, Société des Arts, Bulletin de la Classe d'Industrie et de Commerce, No. 91 (1868), 72Google Scholar, giving results for the years 1862–1866; and an article by Paul Ditisheim, “Classification des échappements,” in the above-cited Travaux of the 1900 Congrès de Chronométrie, pp. 41–44 for the years 1862–1899.

46 See the account in Jaquet and Chapuis, Technique and History of the Swiss Watch, p. 158 and plate 111, showing the same lay-out in eight different sizes, as produced by Leschot's equipment. The account in Elie-François Wartmann, “Notice historique sur les inventions et let perfectionnements faits à Genève dans le champ de l'industrie et dans celui de la médicine,” in Geneva, Société des Arts, Bulletin de la Classe d'Industrie et de Commerce, No. 101, pp. 34–35, states erroneously that Leschot was making watches with identical, interchangeable parts. Only some of the pieces, the plates in particular, satisfied these criteria.

47 Cf. Britain, Great, Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Reports by the Juries (London, 1852)Google Scholar, Class Xb: “Report on Horological Instruments,” p. 311, which reports that Antoine Lecoultre, a Swiss maker of Le Sentier, “is stated to make all his watches with the corresponding wheels of the same size, so that when any wheel is damaged, it can at once be replaced by a new one without any other trouble than that of putting it in.” It is hard to tell from such a report of a report how far Lecoultre had gone in effecting interchangeability; but clearly the Swiss makers of the 1840s were moving in that direction.

Wartmann notes, incidentally, that a Genevan by the name of Jurine had envisaged the possibility of machine-made watches as far back as the middle of the eighteenth-century.

48 Church, Roy, “Nineteenth-Century Clock Technology,” Ec. H. R., 2nd ser., XXVIII (1975), 625Google Scholar, repeats in this connection the oft-heard explanation that Prest's winding was only applicable to watches with a hortizontal escapement. Insofar as “horizontal escapement” is synonymous with the cylinder escapement, this is simply not true: Prest's winding would work with any escapement but a verge, and then only because the verge needed a fusee. See, for example, a lever watch with Prest winding by J. R. Arnold, Charles Frodsham, in 1851, shown in Camerer Cuss, Antique Watches, 230. The source of this piece of misinformation is probably the fact that the cylinder escapement was the only one that the British envisaged using in the early nineteenth century without fusee; and as noted above, keyless winding of fusee was difficult and costly.

49 Cf. Paris Universal Exposition, 1867, Reports of the United States Commissioners: Cenerai Survey of the Exhibition (Washington, 1868)Google Scholar, Class 23: Clock and Watch Work, p. 86.

50 The two major sources are Chapuis, Alfred, La montre chinoise (Neuchâtel, 1919)Google Scholar; and Jequier, François, Une entreprise horlogère du Val-de-Travers: Fleurier Watch Co SA: de Vatelier familial du XIXe aux concentrations du XXe siècle (Neuchâtel, 1972).Google Scholar This is the first scholarly study of the history of a Swiss watchmaking enterprise on the basis of family and business records.

51 [Osterwald, Friedrich], Description des montagnes et des vallées qui font partie de la Principauté de Neuchâtel et Valangin (2d ed.; Neuchâtel, 1766), 94–95.Google Scholar

52 Parliamentary Papers, 1836, XLV: Bowring, “Report on the Commerce …,” 36.

53 Abbott, Henry G., The Watch Factories of America Past and Present (Chicago, 1888), 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The only thing wrong with Dennison's logic in all this was his assumption that the watches he examined were made by the man who signed them. As we have seen, this was by no means certain.

54 Moore, Charles W., Timing a Century: History of the Waltham Watch Company (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 ibid., 13.

56 Ibid., 50.

57 Thus Roskell, the leading maker in Liverpool: about a thousand watches a year from 1800 to 1900. Or Litherlands, another top Liverpool firm: about 40,000 in seventy years. Letter of Evans, D. M. W. in Antiquarian Horology, IX, 6 (March 1976), 705.Google Scholar

58 For the serial numbers of American watches, see, among others, George E. Townsend, Almost Everything You Wanted to Know about American Watches and Didn't Know Who to Ask (pvt. pub., 1971), and Idem, American Railroad Watches (pvt. pub., 1977). These are obtainable by writing the author, 406 Orchard Street, Alma, Mich. 48801.

59 The figures on Swiss watch exports to the United States were as follows (money values in Swiss francs):

60 Favre-Perret, Edouard, Rapport présenté au Haut Conseil Fédéral sur l'industrie de l'horlogerie: Exposition de Philadelphie, 1876, Section suisse, Groupe XXV (Winterthur, 1877).Google Scholar

61 In the meantime, Americans were able to turn out machine-made watches that were good enough for all practical purposes — good enough, for example, to keep time within thirty seconds a week, as railway companies required. For the American railway watch and its standards, see Treiman, Lawrence W., “Railroad Watches and Time Service,” Bull. of the Nat. Assn. of Watch and Clock Collectors, Inc., XV, No. 6 (October 1972), 151–175.Google Scholar

It should be noted in passing that this readiness of the American consumer to make do with manufactures so long as they satisfied their purpose — even if less artistic, elegant, or finished than European handiwork — was already remarked by visitors to the United States at the beginning of the century. See, for example, Milbert, Jacques, Picturesque Itinerary of the Hudson River (translation of 1826 French edition; Ridgewood, N.J., 1968), pp. xxiii–xxvii.Google Scholar

62 Church, “Nineteenth Century Clock Technology,” 626. Church adds, however, that the firm also had trouble with consumers' habits and tastes; in particular, British customers did not like the idea of winding their watches to the right. Church, incidentally, speak's of these as “keyless watches”; which is almost surely not correct, since keyless watches do not have to be wound either to right or to left. Probably “fusee-less watches” is intended.

63 Smith, Alan, in The Lancashire Watch Company, Prescot, Lancashire, England, 1889–1910 (Fitzwilliam, N.H.,: Ken Roberts Publishing Co., 1973), p. 17.Google Scholar

64 Church lays great stress on this point. The “Nineteenth Century Clock Technology,” pp. 628–629. Church sees this readiness to quit watchmaking for other lines as evidence of entrepreneurial initiative. Hence, he says, “competitive weakness cannot be explained simply in terms of lack of enterprise.” But he readily admits that English watch manufacturers, as watchmakers, left much to be desired. Among other things they “seemed to lack the enthusiasm for the development of, and competition in, the markets for low- and medium-priced watches” (628). He cites in this connection the firm of J. W. Player of Coventry, which poured its resources into the production of a supercomolicated watch — the kind of thing that had always been a Swiss monopoly; collected £1000 for this one-of-a-kind masterpiece (it was made for J. P. Morgan); and then went under the following year (1911). See, on this particular watch, an article in the Horological Journal of April 1909, which is cited in extenso in a letter by Jan Skala to Antiquarian Horology, VIII, No. 8 (September 1974), 916–917.Google Scholar

65 See the illustrated catalogue of Smith & Sons Ltd., Guide to the Purchase of a Watch (3rd ed., n.d. [1899]; reprint Sevenoaks: Malcolm Gardner, 1969).Google Scholar Thus best quality keyless watch in gold hunting case: Swiss, £12.10.0; all-English, £25 and up; minute repeater, split-seconds chronograph in gold hunting case: part Swiss, £85; all English, £150.

66 See the memoir on Usher & Cole Ltd., in Camerer Cuss, Antique Watches, 295.

67 Church, “Nineteenth-Century Clock Technology,” 629–630.

68 More exactly, it was so reserved under the system of dispersed cottage manufacture (établissage). Once the factory system came in, a brand new labor force could and sometimes had to be recruited, and the industry began expanding eastward into the German-speaking districts of the cantons of Bern and Solothurn. Here are the figures on the distribution of employment by canton:

69 On the changing relative importance of the two industries in the Swiss Jura, see Daveau, Suzanne, Les régions frontalières de la montagne jurassienne: étude de géographie humaine (Lyons, 1959,)” 419–420.Google Scholar She writes: “It is the direct competition of watchmaking that killed the other mountain industries.”

70 Even in watchmaking, the British continued to innovate: thus the invention in 1892 of the karrusel arrangement by Bahne Bonniksen of Coventry (he had come to England from Schleswig at the age of 24), a relatively simple and reliable device for eliminating position errors; and the introduction of the self-winding wrist watch by Harwood in the 1920s. But the karrusel found limited application, partly because of cost, partly because ordinary watches, in spite of position errors, were accurate enough; while Harwood's wrist watch could be imitated, at lower prices, by Swiss makers.

71 Bienne/Biel offers an interesting test of the cultural configurations of enterprise: it was a predominantly German-speaking city in the eighteenth century, with a French-speaking minority that grew with the watch manufacture. There were German-Swiss watchmakers in Bienne/Biel; they seem to have signed their watches as from Bienne.

72 See, in this regard, the passage from the diary of Samuel Jequier cited by François Jequier, Une entreprise horlogère du Val de Travers, 49–50. I have already had occasion to quote this in my essay on “Religion and Enterprise: The Case of the French Textile Industry,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France, eds. Carter, Edward C. II, Forster, Robert, and Moody, Joseph N. (Baltimore, 1976), 67f.Google Scholar

73 One the Girardet bookstore, see Montandon, Léon, “Samuel Girardet, ses ancêtres, sa boutique, II. La boutique,” Musée neuchâtelois, n.s., XXXVI, 2 (March-April 1949), 47–58.Google Scholar Cf. also the domestic scene in the cottage of a clockmaker of the eighteenth century, shown in Chapuis, Alfred, Histoire de la penduterie neuchâteloise (Paris and Neuchâtel, n.d.), 157.Google Scholar

74 Description des montagnes, 95–97.

75 Cf., on the distinction between open and closed communes (villages) and their disparate potentials for industrial development, Braun, Rudolf, Industrialisierung und Volksleben (Erlenbach-Zurich and Stuttgart, 1960)Google Scholar, ch i.

76 On the market constraints instituted in 1934, see the Lexique de l'économie suisse (Neuchâtel: A la Baconnière, 1965), s.v. “Horlogerie”; also the Handbuch der schweizerischen Volkswirtschaft (1955 ed.) II, s.v. “Uhrenindustrie.” For a highly critical estimate of their consequences, Schaller, François, “L'intervention du pouvoir au sein de l'industrie horlogère,” in Behrendt, R. F., Müller, W., Sieber, H., Weber, M., eds.; Strukturwandlungen der schweizerischen Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft; Festschrift für Fritz Marbach zum 70. Geburtstag (Bern: Stämpfli, 1962), 57–72.Google Scholar Also the lament by Benz, A. L., “Die Problematik antiker Uhrentechnik im Zeichen moderner Industriefertigung,” Chronométrophilia, No.3 (December 1977), 16–18.Google Scholar On the slow response of Swiss industry to technological challenge in the years since World War II, see Wilhelm Hill, “Die Weltbewerbsstellung der schweizerischen Uhrenindustrie: Untersuchung im Auftrag des Eidgenössischen Volkswirtschaftedepartements” (typescript; March 1977).

77 See the report in the New York Times, Sunday, March 5, 1978, Section 3, pp. F1 and 5.