At this time of year ads abound – for perfume and cologne, candy and champagne, jewelry and – yes – watches, but with so many people now carrying cell phones that also tell time, does the wrist watch have a future?
Tuel Jewelers is a fixture on the mall – a place to buy keepsakes since 1945, and a kind of gathering place for long-time residents of Charlottesville.
“I think the most poignant time was after 9/11," recalls owner Mary Loose-Deviney. Our store was full of people who just came in to talk.”
Loose-Deviney first came here when she was two days old. Her mother was, for many years, the bookkeeper, and as Mary grew she became an important part of the operation.
“We had four watchmakers," she recalls. "They would tell mom, who would in turn tell me, ‘Go find this balance staff. Go find this crystal.’”
Charlottesville was on the Chesapeake and Ohio line, and Tuel’s had the contract for keeping railroad employees and their watches on time. Loose-Deviney was intrigued by these little devices – powered by a single spring.
“That main spring is wound, and as that tension is released it causes an arbor to move back and forth," she explains. "That causes the second hand to move – one, two, three, four – and as that second hand moves around 60 seconds then that will move that minute hand once.”
More recently, she came to know watches that kept time based on the consistent vibration of a crystal known as quartz.
“You can put a charge through a quartz crystal. It vibrates at a certain vibration, and then you can take that vibration and turn it into hands that move, so you’ve got a watch that’s pretty accurate,” Loose-Deviney says.
True, it requires a battery, but Loose-Deviney says it may be less expensive and more accurate than the old-fashioned time pieces.
“A quartz watch is accurate generally within about 15 seconds a month. A mechanical watch – a minute a month if you’ve got something that’s really finely tuned. Most of them are 30 seconds a week.”
Her expertise comes from classes taken through the Horological Association of Virginia and the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, but her passion may come from her roots. Her dad, after all, was Swiss.
“He came over after World War II, and as a child we would visit every two years. Most people for Thanksgiving go to see Grandma who lives in the Valley. We always went to Switzerland.”
She knew people there were world leaders in making watches.
“The Swiss were just such engineers, and what they were able to do was to take a watch that was the size of a softball and be able to take that and make it smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. What happens if we use brass? What happens if we use steel? Not only were they able to make the watches and the watch parts smaller, but they were able to make the machines that made the parts smaller.”
She can also tell you about the history of timepieces in Virginia – about Mr. Jefferson’s determination to give each of his grandchildren a pocket watch, about the one he picked up in Paris for his friend George Washington, and about the pricy gold chronometer – a watch carried by Lewis and Clark as they crossed the continent.
“To know how fast is the water running? How quickly can they get across the divide? And if it were not for the founding fathers bringing that time piece here, where would we be today?”
Of course there are those who think watches are history – with Americans depending on cell phones to tell the time, but that’s not how Loose Deviney sees it. She was surprised and pleased when Apple introduced its jazzy little time piece.
“The Apple watch actually had unintended consequences that were really good for the watch industry, because all of a sudden it was interesting and cool, fashionable to have something on your wrist again, instead of pulling something out of a pocket.”
In our next report, we’ll talk with some master craftsmen about the future of the watch and with the owner of a company that has, on occasion, taken more than a decade to make one worth more than a million dollars.
Part Two
It’s been five years since Apple introduced its version of the wristwatch – a model that this year was expected to outsell all other watches combined. Still, the watch-making industry in Switzerland outsold Apple last year, and in some cases was able to charge more than a million dollars for a custom-made timepiece. Sandy Hausman traveled to the epicenter of Swiss watches and filed this report.
On a hot night in June, residents of two small cities just south of the French border gathered in a concert hall to celebrate.
Residents of La Chaud de Fonds and Le Locle were marking ten years as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – two cities built in the late 1700’s to make watches.
“You can see, if you go around and look, that there is a space between each house that allows everyone the same amount of sun during the day, because obviously the watchmaker needed sun to work,” says Nathalie Marielloni, vice curator of the International Museum of Horology – one of two in the area that showcase the history of clocks and watches.
For five hundred years, this was known as Watch Valley, but in the early 70’s Asia stepped up with cheap but accurate quartz watches. Local watchmaker Stephen Forsey recalls the devastation.
“There were almost 90,000 people in Switzerland employed in the watch industry. Now that's a lot for a very small country. Many, many people lost their jobs. The industry at one point was just 21,000 people in the early 1980’s.”
Today, however, watch-making has made a modest comeback. Forsey and his business partner Robert Greubel founded a company that doubled down on luxury and craftsmanship, in some cases taking more than a year and charging over a million dollars for one of their creations.
“If you want to offer a gift to somebody, perhaps for an anniversary, an important birthday, then to engrave it with a special personal message, if you offer a mechanical watch then you’re giving something which will last probably for generations,” he explains.
Greubel Forsey is headquartered in a 17th century farmhouse – sheep grazing on its green roof. There’s a wine cellar and a dining room where 115 employees are served lunch before returning to their finely- detailed work. They will produce about a hundred watches a year for collectors around the world. One contains a tiny globe – turning so you can see which parts of the planet are getting sun, and where night has fallen. Another shares the time in all 24 zones, while a third contains a tiny ship with golden sails. Each is a work of art – and each, Forsey says, is engineered for accuracy.
“We’ve been able to demonstrate a remarkable level of precision for a mechanical watch – within a few tenths of a second of precision per day – ten times more precise as we would have been 40-50 years ago,” Forsey says.
He knows a younger generation has grown up checking smart phones for the time, but smart watches have caught their attention and may, eventually, lead back to a timepiece with a long, strong cultural history.
“A mechanical watch has a soul," says the watch museum's Mariello. "I think that’s what people who wear mechanical watches want is to have a soul on their wrists.”
And to feed appreciation for the craft known as horology – making time pieces -- the museum hosts hundreds of school groups each year inviting the kids to assemble their own clocks.
