by John Biggs
Hallock is a techie who fell into a love of watches, and his movement in the circles of Silicon Valley allows him access to such luminaries as Andy Rubin, Vice President of Engineering at Google. Like a modern-day Breguet and Gide, Büsser pushes the state of horological art while Hallock sells the resulting timepieces to the rich and powerful.
Hallock’s main thrust, however, is to limit the availability of his watches. By offering the MB&F line in a few spots around the globe – New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris – he ensures a scarcity that begets desire. “I’m closing doors,” he said. “Not opening them.”
Even watchmakers like Büsser are living in a world far removed from Breguet’s. Culturally, mechanical watches reached their heyday after World War II, and their prestige had petered out by 1980. Instead of selling clocks that tell time, Büsser and his ilk sell clocks that fulfill desire.
The question, then, is who has donned the patrimony of Breguet and the great watchmakers. Is it Seiko, with its massive Japanese factory and dedication to high-speed automation? Or is it men like Büsser and Francois-Paul Journe, founder of F.P. Journe and a proponent of Breguet’s passionate style? In the end, which watch won? The Marie-Antoinette, the apex of a man’s efforts in horology, or the souscription, the apex of a man’s efforts to make horology accessible to the masses?
There is no real answer. The watch industry is booming, and for every million “fashion watches” sold there are a dozen collector’s pieces, items of such complexity and beauty that they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are seen by only a few people in their lifetimes.
In 2007, I drove from New York City to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for a weekend of unsurpassed watch geekery. I was headed to the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors’ semi-annual Mid-Eastern Regional meeting. Watch collecting can be a solitary hobby, a gradual, painstaking effort by a dedicated fan who, out of shame or fear of misunderstanding, hides his consuming passion from the world. The members of the NAWCC are not these timid men. They are vocal, exuberant, and obsessed with a dying art.
Lancaster is watch country. The foothills of the Alleghenies begin about thirty miles north of this old mill town, and twenty miles south the Susquehanna River rolls down to Havre de Grace and out into the sea. The same features that made this land rich during its smoky, steelmaking days — the proximity of ore, transportation, and cheap labor — have made it an American analog of the Jura Mountains of Switzerland.
The area is home to three great institutions, a triangle forming the last bastion of watchmaking in America. The NAWCC headquarters, in Lancaster proper, offers watchmaking classes and houses a museum and library where a full-time staff still works to spread a seemingly obsolete craft. To the west, in Mount Joy, is RGM, a small factory turning out some of the most beautiful watches in America. To the north is Rolex’s Lititz Watch Technicum, one of the preeminent watchmaking schools in the New World.
By the late 1980s, watchmakers competent to rebuild the classic watches gracing the wrists of potentates and starlets were scarce. The industry, now worth almost $2 billion in the United States, needs four thousand new watchmakers to replace the older ones who are retiring. Watchmaking, with its fixation on the physical over the digital, is not an obvious career choice for the young. In 2002, Rolex bankrolled the founding of the Lititz school, in a building designed by the architect Michael Graves, to ensure that there would continue to be people trained to build and service the company’s watches.
In a twenty-year span, beginning in the early 1950s, American watch companies fell one after another. The Waltham Watch Company in Massachusetts shuttered in 1957 and was followed in 1964 by Elgin National Watch Company in Illinois. Elgin had once been the maker of half of the pocket watches in the world, and was immortalized by Robert Johnson in 1936 when he sang “Walkin’ Blues”: “She’s got Elgin movements/from her head down to her toes.” Gruen, originally based in Ohio, closed in 1977.
Everyone, from doughboys to beatniks, working girls to ladies who lunch, had worn watches made by these companies; they were formidable economic forces in the world market. Bomb timers, gun sights, and avionic readouts came out of their factories in wartime, and their watches were purchased by the millions. Today, they survive mainly as the detritus of decades past at the bottom of old coffee cans and in forgotten corners of long-closed drawers. They have art deco designs, thin, square cases, and faces that are almost illegible by modern standards. They turn up on eBay by the thousands, with tarnished cases and seized movements and bargain prices. Collectors at the regional level revel in such cultural flotsam, penning long, esoteric articles in the monthly Watch & Clock Bulletin (a recent issue was dedicated to “The Longcase Painted Dial in Liverpool”) and meeting regularly to go over their favorite finds and discuss restoration techniques.
This year’s regional was held at the convention center in nearby York. The average attendee at these events is over fifty and trending toward retirement, and many regionals are advertised as vacation packages. They are a way for snowbirds to put their RVs to good use, periodically stopping as they drive south for the winter to pick up vintage clock parts or refresh old friendships. The regionals are held in places like Chattanooga, Houston, and even Dearborn, Michigan, but the Mid-Eastern regional — and the national meeting that is also held here — is among the largest in the country, popular with the mostly male clock and watch collectors of a certain age and stripe, who are inexorably drawn to this picturesque and wallet-friendly spot in the Alleghenies.
In the convention center, on eight rows of tables running the length of the room, watches and clocks are arrayed in a mishmash that seems more flea market than formal gathering. Visitors hop from table to table asking after odd and discontinued watches, parts, and bands. If you have an old watch, these are the folks to take it to, but the dealers’ familiarity with the classics tends to breed contempt, and they look upon lower-end “common” watches, the kind grandfathers across the country once wore, the way a gathering of geologists might appraise driveway gravel.
Every collector has a story about his first clock, or most expensive watch, or craziest garage-sale find. First clocks are often the most expensive, because many beginning collectors are lured in by false promises, only to find themselves stuck with an oversized case clock probably made with millions of others in a factory that has long since gone out of business. Garage-sale finds are the hobby’s grails: A dedicated collector stops at an old shop or stoop sale, idly brushes through a box of timeworn jewelry, and suddenly sees, flashing out from the jumble of paste and cheap bracelets, a watch face that is instantly recognizable. He buys it for a pittance, and a legend is born.
In December 1983, a Chicago man named Chuck Maddox walked into a pawnshop before heading out Christmas shopping with his family. There, in the jewelry case, he noticed a huge watch called the Omega Speedmaster Professional Mark II. The earlier Omega Speedmaster Professional was familiar to aficionados as the moon watch, but Maddox, who at the time worked in heavy construction, knew little of that history, and purchased the watch for $115. He wore it, unserviced, for sixteen years before researching its provenance, an act akin to hanging an unknown, original Picasso in the bathroom for a decade. The watch is worth $2,000 today. When Maddox had the watch repaired and restored to its original luster and beauty in 1999, he became hooked on watches and, until his death in May 2008, was a formidable, well-known figure on the watch circuit.
I didn’t buy anything at the regional, but most of the collectors were selling case clocks and older wristwatches at bargain prices. A roomful of knowledgeable watch people tends to drive prices down considerably. There isn’t talk of the latest fashion trends here. You’re more likely to hear about the Lemania 5100 movement or the Zenith El Primero, two early chronograph wristwatch movements, or the vagaries of fish oil in the guts of old case clocks. The most experienced collectors are looking for prime, new-condition, old-stock watches, the ones locked in a dealer’s case and never removed,
watches still in their original boxes with their original papers. Let the rest of the world rumble through boxes and boxes of broken Hamiltons and shattered Tissots. To a collector, finding a classic 1950s Speedmaster or Rolex is like stumbling on an intact, mummified bog man in the heath.
Telling time has been the pastime of great men for eons, from the wash of a gnomon across the dust on an early sundial to the whispering of the Praetorian guards in Caesar’s ear. Whether watches are being examined by a retired Navy man in a USS Missouri ball cap in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country or riding on the wrists of presidents and prime ministers, they are a resolute bridge between our past and our future.
A few decades ago, regionals were the only way for collectors to paw through each other’s cases, looking for that elusive piece. Now, blogs and auction Web sites allow watch fans to share their daily timepiece choices in posts like “TGIF! What are you wearing today?,” quickly followed by camera phone pictures of wrists wearing almost every known watch — from hundred-thousand-dollar timepieces to popular Seiko divers that barely brush the $100 mark.
Younger enthusiasts progress along a predictable arc. There’s the first acquisition. Then they discover like minds on sites such as the Poor Man’s Watch Forum and ABlogtoRead, edited by a former lawyer turned watch fanatic. Then there’s the growth spurt, fuelled by the sense that one’s collection isn’t complete until every space in one’s specially designed watch box is filled. While, in my collecting heyday, I must have owned sixty watches, a female friend owns hundreds and hundreds of quartz novelty watches from the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Breguet would almost certainly have relished this thriving democracy of watch aficionados, the spiritual heirs of his souscription dream.
Watch fans tend to congregate around large cities in America. The top watch-owning cities are, in order, New York, Boston, Detroit, Buffalo, and San Francisco. Sleepy towns in the South like Memphis and Nashville wear the fewest watches. Perhaps those areas run at a different pace than the rest of the world — as a New Yorker, I like to think so — but throughout the country there are still millions of people wearing millions of watches.
At the same time, as more Americans, and even some Europeans, rely on cellphones and computers and car dashboards for the time, watch wearing has declined dramatically. Only one in ten teenagers wears a watch every day, and watch sales have fallen as much as 17% year over year since 2000. When people do wear watches, they are increasingly sports models designed to time workouts. Watchmaking remains a $15 billion industry, but it is buoyed by the higher average prices paid by die-hards who must have the latest Rolex or Omega.
That market, too, has its collectors. At the height of the dot-com boom, cyberpunk novelist William Gibson became slowly addicted to eBay and spent hours trawling the myriad watches offered there, eventually taking to buying multi-thousand-dollar timepieces. Eric Singer, drummer for the band KISS, wears a vintage TAG Heuer Monaco race chronograph and a unique Rolex diver that, instead of rubber, uses an odd lead seal to ensure waterfastness. Marc Andreesen, creator of the Mosaic Web browser, wears an oversized Jaeger-LeCoultre with a world-time register, and Bernie Madoff, the disgraced Ponzi schemer, amassed a collection of some forty classics, including a number of Rolexes from the 1940s. One, a Monoblocco “prisoner watch,” had originally been offered for sale — with payment expected after the war — to British POWs who’d had their watches confiscated by the Germans. After Madoff’s arrest, the collection sold at auction for $4 million.
Watch companies often team up with stars of stage, sport, and screen to flog their product to the public. After Omega purchased the rights to become James Bond’s watch of choice, the company’s sales shot up almost forty percent. TAG Heuer uses Eric Clapton. Rolex uses Tiger Woods. Raymond Weil uses Charlize Theron, or did until she showed up at an event wearing a Christian Dior watch; Weil subsequently sued her for ten million British pounds — about $15 million — for breaching her endorsement contract.
Watchmaking these days is 49 percent manufacturing and 51 percent marketing. The Swatch Group’s portfolio includes watches at every price point, from $100 plastic watches to $1 million monstrosities. A few million watches are sold every year, and the industry has quadrupled since the 1980s. In 2007, Swiss watchmakers grossed 13.7 billion Swiss francs, or about $11 billion (compared with $50 billion for the entire luxury apparel industry).
There is little interaction among the various strata of the modern market. On the low end, makers like Timex and Fossil sell three-handed quartz watches with no complications. Companies like Seiko and Citizen, which during the quartz crisis sold affordable watches with “features” like data banks, calculators, and musical alarms, have gone upscale, Seiko with its Seiko Grand watches and Citizen and Casio with their higher-end “wrist computers,” with features including barometers, altimeters, and world time readouts. In 2008, the range in quality between $10 and $100 was slim: Most watches at these prices are mass-produced and use movements spit out by a machine in seconds.
One step up, the $500-$8,000 market encompasses a whole gamut of possible complications and features, but one thing is certain: Each watch almost certainly uses an ETA mechanical or quartz movement. Since Nicolas Hayek took over ETA and formed the Swatch Group in 1983, ETA has regained its dominance in mid-tier movements. Most watchmakers purchase a base ETA movement and then add complications to it, often burnishing and decorating it by hand. Manufacturers can order watches with multiple features, including GMT hand, date and day registers, and hacking seconds — a method for stopping the seconds hand when the crown is pulled out. Omega, Breitling, and Movado all use ETA movements in even their most expensive watches. The outside of two of these watches can be completely different but the heart of all of them beats the same.
Before the quartz juggernaut, watch lines took a year or so to modify and even longer to push into production. Now, with a highly regimented and skilled crew, watchmakers can add refinements to movements almost overnight. Many watchmakers and sellers find that collectors will buy essentially the same watch for essentially the same price — even if they own the earlier model — whenever an internal change is implemented. When Rolex began using silicon in some if its movements, passionate collectors sold or shelved their old models and picked up the new ones — the equivalent of a Lexus owner selling or garaging his car because the company added a different trunk release button in the 2009 model.
Finally, high-end manufacturers like Breguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre pride themselves on small batch productions of watches made entirely by hand. Breguet, which makes about forty thousand watches per year, stands out for its high prices and marketing focus on its most complex and complicated watches. Recently, the company has been promoting the Reveil du Tsar, a piece based on a watch made in 1813 for Czar Alexander of Russia. Despite its $40,000 price tag, Breguet heavily advertises the watch in the national and international press as a mainstream option for the rich connoisseur. Breguet, like such companies as Prada and Aston Martin, is betting that someone, somewhere, with a lot of disposable income, will make an exorbitant impulse purchase or at least be intrigued enough by the brand to buy one of the company’s lower-end offerings. Either way, it’s a win.
Large profits have allowed Breguet, and more broadly the Swatch Group, to become a patron of the arts and sciences and to open watchmaking schools in the United States and abroad. They also allowed the company to set about rebuilding Breguet’s masterpiece from fumes, a process that took considerably less time, and considerably more money, than it took to build the original.
But all the fine timepieces in the world can’t match the feeling of elation and awe I feel that the Marie-Antoinette, Breguet’s masterpiece, still exists. It is, in short, the watch that defined watchmaking, a compact horological library, and an expression of love and devotion as amazing as the Taj Mahal. The long river of its tragic story, its disappearance and acrimonious reappearance, the fates of its owners, and the wild tales that surround it
have turned this watch from a mere collection of cogs into something more, something eternal and timeless, something sublime.
And so it ticks forever, alone in beauty and desired by all who see it. It was a gift to a queen that became a gift to the world and now it is back home, safe and sound.
Endnotes
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