by John Biggs
Breguet also explored a number of tangential topics including the principle of “voluntary movement” in insects, even writing an “Essay Upon Animal Strength, and on the Principle of Voluntary Movement.” Noting that a butterfly pinned to a card — still alive — would beat its wings interminably for hours, and even days. He wondered if he could somehow harness this organic energy in his clockwork. The resulting experiments presaged the development of organic chemistry.
In his later years, Breguet began moving back toward his overarching obsession: precision. His war on friction, the fight of his youth, was finally won, and now he was able to dedicate himself to the measure of seconds and sub-seconds in a way that was previously unfathomable.
He began supplying laboratories and observatories with striking clocks that could measure the passage of time while astronomers observed the heavens. One model fit right onto the telescope itself, allowing an observer to make highly granular measurements without having to glance at his watch.
Breguet also built some of the first stopwatches, complete with stop and run buttons. A model built in 1820, the number 4000, was a split seconds stopwatch, which allowed for the measurement of two concurrent events. When the stopwatch was engaged, two seconds hands would simultaneously move across the dial. With the press of a button, the first hand would stop, while the other hand continued. Another press, and the other hand would stop. A final press, and the entire movement reset itself, seating the hands back into place. The complexity of such a watch, called a chronometre a doubles secondes, dazzled Academy members and was invaluable to its explorers in their attempts to time steam-powered locomotives, and, more ambitiously, measure the speeds of sound and light. Experimenters in the early nineteenth century also worked with various Breguet inventions – including the miniaturized bimetallic ship’s thermometer – to show that sound could heat a metal plate and that iron conducted sound better than air.109
Always present in the background was the 160, which Breguet worked on in bursts. He seems to have put it aside for a decade or more. The first nineteenth-century record of him working on it appears in 1809. Then, suddenly, it again became an obsession. He worked on it 284 days in 1812, 228 days in 1813, and 212 days in 1814, a considerable outlay of time and talent for his small company. When his most trusted customers visited the shop, he favored them with glimpses of the Marie-Antoinette, its sharp cornered gears and pushers bound against a small disk of brass that was polished to an impeccable shine. By 1820, his workshop was putting out a few hundred watches a year at most. The 160, nearly complete, lay on his assistant Michel Weber’s bench, where the final complications were being added. Maybe, when it was finished, Breguet would show it in an exhibition. Maybe it was destined for his pocket alone. The records never stated to whom it was decreed.
The Revolution was already thirty years old, and the 160 was now a dictionary of all that Breguet had learned in the intervening years. Like a great architect sweeping his arm across the face of his defining edifice, Breguet could point to the 160 and explain that everything – everything he knew – was in that single piece.
This watch was the apex of his art. It was his personal masterpiece, a marriage of technology and art that amazed all who saw it. Like the technological gadgets that would follow it — the X-ray machine, the iPod, the Mars Rover — it was at once beautiful and full of utility. It was almost impossible to describe how hard it had been to build — nothing like it had ever been attempted — and the efforts of so many men for so many years had not created a jumble of clashing gears but a symphony that played in perfect harmony.
His sons and business partners had come to view the 160 as a strange obsession for the master. Hadn’t he created the finest watches in Paris? Hadn’t his timepieces traversed the globe, from France to Turkey, from the horn of Africa to Brazil? They were perplexed that he was still drawn to this massive nest of complications, which was more pomp than substance, a gold watch with a crystal face stuffed with all the tricks of his art.
On September 15, 1823, Breguet set out on his daily constitutional, which traced a course from the Quai de l’Horloge, south over the Pont Neuf, then along the Seine to the Quai de Conti, to the Academy of Science. Most days, Breguet, now 76, would spend a few hours at his bench and then, when his legs would carry him, come here to the domed edifice that housed the Academy.
Physically, Breguet was diminished. His hair had gone gray long ago, and his small face now looked even smaller against his high collar. The summer months, when the Seine ran like a sewer and the fetid city air hung heavily all around, were the worst for the old man.
A year had passed since the first signs of illness, a severe shortness of breath that kept him in bed from August 1822 until January. His friends at the Academy visited him often during his illness, one friend noting: “It would have been far too early to lose you.”110 They spoke loudly at his bedside, because his hearing was going, possibly a side effect of the metal-fabricating din he had been exposed to over the years.
The next year was difficult, but by September he was back behind his bench. His sure hand now strayed, and his lines in the ledger and his notebooks grew thin and unsure. He was limited to sketching now, and no longer drafting. One of these rough drawings, about an inch high, showed a carriage clock shaped like one of the equal leg arch windows of the Academy. In the clock’s center, he scrawled three registers. Below the equation of time — which he marked simply “equation,” in his cramped script — were small windows for the jour, mois, and année.
It seemed a larger cousin of a watch he had completed in 1819, the 2522, with its main dial, subsidiary hour, minutes, and seconds registers, and central stopwatch. The 2522 was a precursor to the chronograph, with an elegant, tripartite face and three tiny hands that beat the time.
Recently, Breguet had noticed his symptoms resurfacing. His legs were weak and pained him, and his walks were less and less frequent. A few weeks earlier, he had spent an afternoon at the Academy’s exhibition at the Louvre, acting as advisor and jurist, and found that by the end of the day he was completely run down. Just four days before, he had returned with his grandson, Louis-Clement, already a renowned watchmaker in his own right, to continue his judging duties, and circled through the exhibition a full four times.
Today, he was still feeling the effects of his exertions. As he walked along the river he had worked beside for half a century, he tried to inhale deeply and found that he could not. The breathlessness was back. He barely had the strength to check his watch, but he knew he needed to rest. His difficulty breathing came and went throughout that night and into the next, as he lay in bed listening to the soothing percussion of all his ticking clocks and watches. On the morning of September 17, 1823, at his home on the now renamed Quai de I’Horloge du Palais, as he lay in bed and his son held him, Abraham-Louis Breguet died.
“Master Breguet is gone,” shouted apprentices along the Quai, as they made their delivery rounds. Soon everyone on the Quai knew, and then everyone in the city. Watchmakers walked along the Quai in a long procession, paying their respects as they passed beneath the window where the master had worked for so many years. In their pockets, their own creations ticked, but so much of what they knew had come from him. The shape of a gear, the precision of a transmission, a method to maintain accuracy – they were all Breguet’s. His colleagues built watches, but Breguet had built watchmaking.
The day after his death, thirty carriages carrying the crème of the watchmaking world followed the hearse to the Père Lachaise cemetery, where La Fontaine and Molière, among so many other eminent Frenchmen, lay buried. The cemetery was still far from the city in those days, and its narrow avenues were at once close and cluttered. When the peasants heard that Breguet was dead, they began to follow the procession, talking of Breguet’s generosity.
The funeral began at 1 p.m. Noblemen spoke, as Breguet was laid to rest. A ship’s navigator, Freycinet, who carried Breguet watches twice around the world, said a few
words about the man’s work, and the Duc de Praslin, for whom Breguet had made a watch to rival the Marie-Antoinette, spoke of his business acumen and rigor. The paeans were brief and marked by sobs. “The grief of all these eminent men crowding around your tomb is your finest eulogy,” Charles Dupin, a naval engineer, said in remembrance. “The entire nation will mourn your loss, for you have contributed so greatly to the triumph of her arts. Thus the title ‘pupil of Breguet’ ensures the holder the justified esteem of the whole of Europe.”
Joseph Fourier, the mathematician and fellow member of the Academy, offered a touching panegyric, stating that “to place oneself in the first rank of a difficult and necessary profession, to invent and give perfection, to guide navigators, to give new instruments to science, to create one’s own fortune whilst founding it on public usefulness, to enjoy friendship, ignore ingratitude, and be above envy and jealousy—that is a happy and honourable destiny.”111
And then Breguet was laid in his crypt. As the door closed, the assembled crowd checked their watches and began the long ride home.
Four years passed. On December 31, 1827, the feast of Saint Sylvestre in Paris, Antoine-Louis Breguet had something else to celebrate besides the dawning of the New Year. Across the city, families sat awaiting the clarions and horns that marked the cusp of another January, and Antoine-Louis raised a coupe of champagne in a toast.
After his father’s death, Antoine-Louis had assumed full control of the firm. He was now fifty-five years old, a major figure on the Quai in his own right, and his life had come to resemble his father’s in other, more melancholy ways. At the turn of the century he had begun an affair with Jeanne-Francoise Maleszewski, whose husband Pierre was a friend of the master, a tireless supporter of the brand who sold his watches throughout Central and Eastern Europe. He was an envoy and diplomat with many military ties, and it was through these connections that Breguet had been able to sell his nascent telegraphs to General Desolle of the French Imperial army, a financial coup.
Between 1798 and 1804 Maleszewski worked in Warsaw, leaving his wife and children with the Breguet family in Paris. Meanwhile, his wife Jeanne lost her father in 1799 and then two infant children, conceived during the brief periods that Maleszewski was in Paris. The strain was too much, and she became close to the master’s son, Antoine-Louis, who was handsome and kind. Jeanne divorced her husband in 1809, and the couple moved to Bourg-la-Reine, south of Paris. But Antoine-Louis’ happiness was cut short like his father’s. In 1813, Jeanne-Francoise died, leaving a boy and a girl in the younger Breguet’s care. The master’s son returned to the Quai and lived with his widowed father. The children were sent to Neuchâtel to live with relatives.
Now, four years after laying his father to rest, Antoine-Louis finally closed the 160. It was finished. With him was Michel Weber, his father’s trusted old deputy, who had toiled on the 160 for nearly half a century. Antoine-Louis, born in 1776, had grown up watching his father and Weber work side-by-side, had seen the 160 go from a hazy, over-ambitious dream to an increasingly intricate work-in-progress. Someone in the firm, most likely the conscientious Boulanger, wrote in bold letters in the logbook, below the notations recording the final work, an anticlimactic coda to an epic endeavor: “Mettre les nouveaux frais qui pourraient se presenter au compte the marchandise.” “Put the new fees that may arise in the goods account.” Then Antoine-Louis and the others said good night and went their separate ways for the evening.
The greatest watch ever made, born of love and genius and tragedy, which took forty-four years to complete, which outlived its creator, its commissioner, and its intended recipient, was finished at last, and then nothing. There was no special fanfare, beyond this quiet celebration by its makers.
Later that night, as fireworks exploded over the Seine, red, blue, and white bursts of light flashed in the sky and reflected off the big windows of the house on the Quai and the crystal faces and blued hands of the watches displayed behind them on velvet cushions. The New Year had arrived.
Amid the darkness of the workshop, the 160, nestled in a silk-lined box, ticked quietly among its sisters — the big Regulator on the wall used to set each watch, the repeaters, the subscription watches, the carriage clocks, the tourbillons, the case clocks — all of them ticking in a murmuring chorus, their midnight chimes echoing through the empty workshop against the fading peals of the bells of Notre Dame.
Chapter 14
Paris
After Antoine-Louis Breguet and Michel Weber celebrated the completion of the 160 in 1827, the watch remained in the Breguet showroom, a silent testament to its late architect’s genius and a marketing beacon for the firm he had left behind. His son, less obsessed with the art of watchmaking, stayed busy expanding the company as a major supplier to European navies.
Some years later — records of the exact date were lost — the firm priced the 160 at around 17,000 gold francs and sold it to an unnamed buyer. By 1838, it was in the possession of the aged Marquis de La Groye, Marie-Antoinette’s former page, who had it for a few years before sending it back to the firm for repair. The childless Marquis died soon after, and when no one came to reclaim the watch, ownership reverted to the company.
The watch then sat, untouched, for the next half-century, until, in 1887, an English collector named Sir Spencer Brunton bought it for six hundred pounds. Brunton was a financier whose daughter, Enid, a stage actress in London, would in 1905 take up the role of the mother in J.M. Barrie’s popular new play, Peter Pan (“the revival has been received with such acclamations that there seems a serious danger of ‘Peter Pan’ being made not a little ridiculous, as the object of a cult,” wrote one reviewer).112
By this time, the allure of a watch such as the Marie-Antoinette had only increased from the days when Breguet was alive. In the eyes of industrial Britain, with its electric lights and new modes of thinking, the previous century possessed a sepia charm. Reminders of a more chivalrous age were a welcome distraction from the dirt and grease of industrial London.
The 160 kept changing hands. Brunton sold it to one Murray Mark, another collector who left no trace of his purchase save a note in the Breguet firm’s ledger. Eventually, he, in turn, seems to have sold the watch to David Lionel Salomons, an inventor and industrialist who was passionate about Breguet and his work.
Like Axel von Fersen, Salomons, born in 1851, was a man out of time. But if Fersen was trapped in a courtly past, Salomons’ thinking penetrated far into the future. He was hindered only by the limits of his age. An early proponent of electricity, traffic control systems, and “horseless carriages,” he helped pull England into the twentieth century.
He noted that he “was born a mechanic,” and that his favorite toys in childhood were “a clockwork engine, some building bricks, and a box of tools.” His great-grandfather had been an astronomer and mathematician, his father an art collector. “Thus,” he wrote, “it comes about that I admire the beautiful when combined with mechanics.”
He had a decidedly Victorian grumpiness about him, along with the air of a sly professor. His biography described memberships in societies dealing with “astronomy, chemistry, civil engineering, geology, geography, meteorology, commerce, physics, military, inventions, archaeology, law, statistics, zoology, botany, agriculture, electrical engineering, photography, microscopy, and ‘self-propelled traffic’.”113
He wore impeccably tailored but slightly rumpled suits and kept a beard and mustache in the style of Freud over his sharp eyes and prominent nose. He often carried a watch attached to a long chain. At the other end was a small mechanical gun, a miniature six-shooter with an inch-long barrel. Some of his stolidity, as well as whimsy, comes out in his description of his early years, which he spent banging tools together rather than playing with soft toys:
A mechanic cannot be made any more than a painter, a poet or a musician. When I was young, nurseries were not ‘toy shops’ like they are today, and children were happier in consequence. I did want one thing mor
e — a Statham’s l0s. 6d. “Chemical Cabinet for Youths.” For years I looked into the window of a chemist shop where some were displayed in the king’s Road at Brighton, but my l0s. 6d. was not to be forthcoming for a long time. Looking back from my age today to that period, it may have been a merciful thing for the household that I did not possess the chemicals then.
Salomons’ love of watches came early. At the age of fourteen, he “made friends with a little working watch repairer, and I induced him to let me come into his shop from time to time in the evening, to learn to make pivots and do other work, also to repair jewelry.” He began taking repair work home, and he scraped together money for tools, “which were not many.”
At twenty-three, Salomons, having heard “Breguet’s name spoken of with reverence,” hunted down some of his work. On Regents Street, he found a larger Breguet clock, but at 150 pounds, the price was too dear for him. Ever the engineer, he was content to “study it carefully in his mind” and leave it for another, vowing “never to buy on my own judgment until I have had proper experience.”
The bug truly bit when he visited another shop on Bond Street. There, he found a Breguet perpetuelle that was not running. A quick inspection of the movement found that an “inexperienced watchmaker [had] broken a wheel,” a quick fix for a polymath like Salomons, and he discuss the piece with the proprietor of the shop who “pointed out and explained all the complicated details and the beauty of Breguet’s workmanship.”114
Over his lifetime, Salomons would assemble a massive collection of Breguet timepieces — some 140 of them, including a number of contemporary works by the firm that still bore the watchmaker’s name. It was the defining assemblage of Breguet’s oeuvre, and Salomons kept it at Broomhill, his castle-like estate in Kent County, England, which had an opulent theatre with side parlors bearing the names of various great inventors.
