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Revolution in Time cover

Revolution in Time

David Landess

 4/5

read: 2022-06-16

non-fiction · #history

The industry of clock-making. How it started, how it went.

A book about the history of the mechanical clock. Its inventors, investors and consumers. I really enjoyed reading this. It’s like reading a history book but looking through a very specific lens. I like it as a concept and after reading this book I added a lot more ‘history of industry’ books to my list.

The mechanical clock

  1. Weight driven
  2. Transmitted energy of falling weight through a gear train
  3. Used oscillation to track the flow of time

1. Why Innovation Was Focused in Europe

  • China
    • Astronomical clock
    • Water wheel clocks & clepsydras (sand timers with water)
      • Froze in winter (same as in Europe)
  • Middle East
    • No trouble with cloudy skies or cold weather
    • Hence sundials and water clocks worked fine —> No innovation
  • Room for error
  • Europeans brought clocks to China
  • China did not take opportunity to copy and improve them
  • China did not need to know the time like Europe did
  • Communist china —> You do things when government says, not at a certain time
  • Clocks represented an insult to china
    • Clocks very Christian (telling you when to pray etc)
  • Interest in time measurement —> The clock (Not the other way around)
  • Popularity of clocks grew in line with developments in Astronomy
  • Also grew as Christianity grew (prayer times)
  • Monestary bells —> Timings for monks to increase productivity for God
  • Early turret clocks
    • Very expensive
    • A mark of prestige

2. History of Horological Techniques

  • Personalisation of time
    • Miniturisation (1400s)
      • Allowed for portability
      • Birth of the watch
      • Who’s watch was most accurate? <— Status symbol
      • “Privatisation”/personalisation of time —> Individualism —> Growth of horology in Europe
    • War
      • Personal time was useful for military organisation
  • Regional Focuses
    • Main parts of horology development
      1. English/Dutch: Greater accuracy & measurement precision
      2. Germans: Greater complexity (minaturisation, advanced engineering)
      3. French: Development of the watch as an ornament of beauty
    • Drivers of accurate time measurement
      1. Astronomers
      2. Calculation of longitude at sea (longitude can be inferred from time differences at sea)
        • “Dead reckoning”
        • Britain announced big prize for whoever could solve this longitude problem
  • Further Precision
    • 1600s - Introduction of a minute hand
    • Galileo vs Huygens: Who invented the pendulum clock?
    • Industry ran into the verification problem
      • How do you know if your watch is accurate if you dont have an accurate watch to compare it to?
    • 1690s - Introduction of second and fractional second hands
      • In Britain to ensure bookies knew the winner of Horse races
  • Reaching an Asymptote
    • The last gains are the hardest and this was the point the industry was at
    • Improvements generally came in reduction of friction
      • Using crystals/rubies in watches
      • Adding oil regularly
  • Longitude Problem Solved
    • John Harrison
      • Englishman that solved the longitude problem with a clock he made from wood
      • His clock was called the H4
  • French rise to challenge English dominance
    • Pierre Le Roy
      • Arguably the greatest horologist to ever live
      • Chronometer (detend) escapement
    • Ferdinand Berthoud - Another french clockmaker
    • Patriotism drove the french horologists
  • Arnold v Earnshaw
    • In 1700s, John Arnold began to manufacture and industrialise the Chronometer
    • Ran into competition from Thomas Earnshaw
    • Large debate around the father of the English marine clock: Earnshaw vs Arnold
    • A pocket chronometer by either of these men would still work perfectly today
    • One Second = 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of ground state of the cesium-133 atom

3. Who Made Clocks, and How

  • Royal comissions
    • Something unique to clockmaking in the 1700s-1800s was that maintenance was as costly and time consuming as production
    • “Royally comissioned”
      • Watchmaking was expensive, so initially horologists were comissioned by royalty and the ultra wealthy to make custom pieces
  • Division of labour
    • Driven by specialisation
    • Clockmaking broke down into
      • Master clockmaker - Owner of the shop and maker of designs/manufacturing process
      • Apprentices - Doing apprenticeship under a master
      • Journeymen - Completed apprenticeship but had not yet opened their own shop
    • Clockmakers guilds
      • Made to protect against competition
      • Had to be in the guild to sell clocks
    • Prevention of competition = Decreased innovation
  • British Superiority
    • Britain vs France
    • Industrial revolution
      • British horology enjoyed a century of superiority in the 1700s
      • Demand for watches in Britain grew as people had more money
    • Initiation of import wars on watches from france
    • Importing watches to copy them was a big market too
  • Geneva
    • Place of refuge for protestants in France
    • Had a highly skilled population
    • Had access to cheap labour in the farms of the mountains
    • Travelling merchants grew in importance
      • Knew what was popular
      • Transported watches
  • The Swiss Jura
    • Abundance of cheap labour
    • Low cost mass production
    • Made very cheap watches
    • Standardised parts —> Replaceable
    • Geneva made the custom beautiful watches, the jura mass produced for the standard person
  • UK unable to compete with the Swiss
    • “Unification of time”
    • As everyone needed to know the time —> Increased demand —> Benefits mass producers (Swiss Jura)
    • Policy blockades preventing Jura watches in UK were avoided with smuggling, etc
    • Growth of common time from: Railways, industrial work
  • Growth of Swiss Industry
    • Improvement of both quality and quantity from the Swiss
    • New swiss watchmakers were popping up to make new styles (eg. Patek Phillipe)
    • Swiss market too small —> Needed to export —> Made the industry more flexible to change
  • American mass production
    • Driven by civil war of 1850s
    • Used machinery to make parts
      • High production and great quality + accuracy
    • US marketed their watches better than other nations
  • Swiss Response to the US
    • Swiss reacted to US much better than Britain did to the Swiss
    • Swiss stressed the quality of their pieces, which were better than the US
    • Marketed itself with a Swiss prestige
    • After this the US industry fell away
    • The Swiss became crazy dominant in the watch market
  • Quartz Watches
    • USA and Japan benefitted from this
      • Timex, Seiko, Casio
      • US did mass production right with Quartz watches
    • Swiss lacked the technological ability to compete
      • They stuck to the high quality, good prestige mechanical watches
    • Quartz kept better time than a lot of more expensive watches
    • Swiss lost a lot of market share as a result of not doing well with Quartz
    • Swiss are still untouchable in the prestige market
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