HSNY Introduces New Membership Benefits & Adds Custom Shop Items

In Collaboration with Jean Rousseau

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) officially turns 159 years old today and is celebrating with new membership benefits and shop additions!

Founded in 1866 as a guild by watchmakers for watchmakers, HSNY has evolved over the century into a nonprofit organization with a mission to advance the art and science of horology. To celebrate the milestone, HSNY has collaborated with French leather goods specialist atelier Jean Rousseau to create custom pieces fit for any horological aficionado.

INTRODUCING THE 44TH STREET STRAPS

Gold and Silver-tier members can complement their signature HSNY looks with the 44th Street Straps – elegant and unisex watch straps constructed with premium patent alligator and smooth calfskin leather, each embossed with HSNY’s modern logo in metallic foil for instantly recognizable flair. The Society’s name and founding year are embossed on the inside of the straps providing a unique added touch. 

The atelier will provide a complete bespoke experience to members, whether based in New York City or abroad, and fit each strap to a customer’s preferred timepiece. Jean Rousseau buckles and foil colors of gold or silver will be offered to complement the selected timepieces. 

Gold-tier members will receive the complimentary alligator and calfskin version of the 44th Street Strap upon opt-in. Silver-tier members will receive the calfskin version, both available in a classic black color. Current Gold and Silver-tier members with active, recurring membership can opt-in to receive the new benefit. A 4-6 week lead time is required due to customization. 

“We’re thrilled to collaborate on this special project with Jean Rousseau and offer our members a unique blend of style, craftsmanship, and horological heritage,” said Nicholas Manousos, Executive Director of the Horological Society of New York.

NEW IN THE HSNY SHOP

HSNY also announces the addition of the HSNY Leather Cardholder to its online gift shop. Made from premium patent alligator, this compact and lightweight double cardholder is designed for the modern world. It securely holds and protects your cards — whether they are metro passes, IDs, or credit cards. With one card slot on each side and a natural goatskin lining, the limited-edition cardholder combines style and practicality in one. The HSNY Leather Cardholder is embossed with the Society’s name and founding year in metallic foil and is available in limited-edition colors of red and green. All proceeds benefit HSNY’s mission of advancing the art and science of horology.

Redemption

To receive the 44th Street Strap, members must opt-in on HSNY’s membership plan management portal. Jean Rousseau will contact members individually to arrange delivery (shipping and taxes apply). Two watch straps (alligator and calfskin) may be redeemed per Gold membership; only one watch strap (calfskin) may be redeemed per Silver membership, regardless of plan cancellation, freeze or restart. Benefits are available only to members with active recurring memberships.

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

Reading Time at HSNY: “You Must Hate Smartwatches, Huh?”

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by St John Karp. 

This is a question we get often at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY). And the short answer is: No! We don’t! HSNY’s Jost Bürgi Research Library has many books about quartz movements and digital watches, but smartwatches are more than just electronic, they’re a whole computer/cellphone on your wrist. HSNY’s Executive Director Nicholas Manousos often wears a smartwatch and says that the best watch is the one that works for you. I appreciate that answer because it embraces all the reasons that people wear watches: as status symbols, for sentimental value, as mementos, for fashion, for a love of horology, to track fitness, or just for the fun of it. It’s a big, colorful world out there and we appreciate all the ways people wear watches. But we all know I wouldn’t be writing this blog post if all I wanted to give you was the hippie love-fest answer, so what is the real deal with smartwatches?

From “Horology”: the Apple Watch, series 5

The long answer is that smartwatches are also very interesting from a horological perspective. Horology isn’t just about pendulums and escapements (though to be fair, a whole section of the library is dedicated to pendulums and escapements). The problem with the way people view smartwatches comes from the fact that computers present people with a flat screen that looks like a dead end, but in truth, every screen is really a window; only when you look through it can you see the rest of the story. Behind every smartwatch, behind every computer, is a vast network of infrastructure that exists solely to let your gizmo know what time it is. So what is this vast infrastructure and how does it work? Is the internet full of gnomes and gremlins toiling away in the salt mines to enable teenagers to post selfies on social media? How is any of this horological at all? Let’s find out!

The Seiko Quartz-Astron on display at HSNY’s exhibit“The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko,” 2024

Our story begins with quartz, the rebellious bad boy of the mineral world that revolutionized the watch and clock industry in the 1970s and simultaneously put many clock- and watchmakers out of business. Nicholas Foulkes in “Patek Philippe: The Authorized Biography” writes that Patek Philippe’s belief in the irreplaceability of mechanical watch movements led it “to nurture quartz technology without knowing that it would grow to be a voracious cuckoo in the nest; to bring it within the city walls only to find that it was in fact a Trojan horse.” He later describes the collapse of the Swiss watch industry at the hands of quartz as a “Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods). You can’t accuse horologists of not having a flair for drama! HSNY’s library had that very Trojan horse on display in our 2024 exhibit “The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko,” which included a Seiko Quartz-Astron, the first commercially available quartz watch.

Prior to the invention of quartz movements, all timekeeping depended on the physical action of some sort of regulator such as a pendulum or a balance wheel or tuning fork. By contrast, quartz movements, as Benjamin Matz (Trustee Emeritus of HSNY) writes in “The History and Development of the Quartz Watch,” work by passing an electrical charge through a small piece of quartz and measuring the resulting vibrations. According to Alex Newson in “Fifty Watches That Changed the World,” the Quartz-Astron was precise to within 0.2 seconds per day, significantly more so than a wholly mechanical movement could be. Which isn’t to say mechanical watches aren’t still cool — I wear one every day — but computers require clocks too and it might detract from the cool factor if your sleek, sexy Macbook ran on an old-timey pendulum.

“Pish-posh!” you may say. “Flimflam and flapdoodle! My computer doesn’t have a clock.” Actually, your computer contains two clocks, each of which has its own important job. The first clock is required to synchronize the operations of the computer’s components, just like the conductor of an orchestra sets the pace and coordinates the musicians. Remember back in the old days when your desktop computer ran at 33 MHz and had a turbo button you could use to jazz it up to 120 MHz? That’s the speed of the computer’s clock signal. The faster your computer’s clock can run, the more quickly your Facebook timeline loads. If the computer’s clock is like a conductor, then the turbo button is like giving the conductor three shots of espresso. Every consumer computer in the world contains one of these conductors, including your laptop, your smartphone, your car, your TV, your fitness tracker, and your smartwatch, and, just like a quartz watch, your computer’s clock signal runs off the vibrations of a piece of quartz.

The Y2K/millennium bug!

Your computer’s second clock is a real-time clock, also quartz-based, that keeps something closer to what we’d call human time. In most cases, your computer keeps track of human time by counting the number of seconds that have elapsed since some arbitrary starting point. In the case of Windows computers, the starting point is January 1, 1601, while in the case of Unix-based systems such as MacOS and Android, it’s January 1, 1970. This has resulted in an impending “year 2038 problem” because in the year 2038, the number of seconds elapsed since 1970 will have grown so large it will exceed the computer’s ability to store it, resulting in a potential crisis similar to the millennium bug in 2000. For now, however, we can safely punt that problem down the road and let our kids worry about fixing it. All you need to know is that this timestamp can be converted into a proper date and time whenever you want to read the clock on your desktop or your phone. It’s not, however, a simple calculation. It has to take into account all the leap years, leap seconds, daylight savings transitions, time zones, and locale irregularities that have happened between 1970 and now. I for one am very glad that it’s someone else’s job to deal with that mess.

From “Patek Philippe: The Authorized Biography”: an early quartz clock, 1959

For a while, your computer’s real-time clock was sufficient, but then along came the internet, causing trouble as usual. Sure, your smartwatch could keep ticking over just fine using its own internal quartz clock. But because your smartwatch connects to the internet, it has to integrate and synchronize with every other machine connected to the internet so they can all agree on what time it is. If a bunch of machines talked to each other but all assumed the conversation was happening at different times, chaos would ensue.

The way all these gizmos keep in sync is by regularly pinging a nearby time server. The time server is a computer with the sole task of knowing what time it is and distributing that information to anyone who asks. If you could spy on your smartwatch and see all the messages it sends into the ether, you’d find out that it’s bothering a nearby time server with lots of questions on a regular basis. Almost annoyingly regular, if you ask me — I’ve broken up with exes for being less needy than that.

But now all we’ve done is move the goalposts back. Your computers don’t have to know what time it is because they ask the time servers, but how do all the time servers know what time it is? Dr. Demetrios Matsakis, former chief scientist for the Time Service department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, gave one of HSNY’s monthly lectures on this topic in 2016. His lecture, Theories of Time, is available online, but visitors to our library might take the opportunity to read the book he authored with Dr. Parameswar Banerjee titled “An Introduction to Modern Timekeeping and Time Transfer.” In their book Drs. Banerjee and Matsakis go into great detail about computer network time synchronization, which is the process by which all the world’s networked computers keep the same time. The time servers mentioned above take their cue from a high-precision reference clock such as an atomic clock.

But what do atoms know about the time anyway? Who put quantum particles in charge of our smartwatches? HSNY’s public demands answers! Up until 1967 the second was pretty much an afterthought. First people had days, which were self-evident because people could see the sun rise and set. Then they divided the days into 24 hours, and the hours into 60 minutes, and the minutes into 60 seconds. The lowly second was therefore a byproduct of dividing up the larger units of time. In 1967, however, the whole thing was flipped on its head when the second was given an official definition based on the vibration rate of a cesium atom. Minutes, hours, and days were then defined in relation to the second instead of the other way around. This, Chad Orzel writes in “A Brief History of Timekeeping,” marks the point at which we divorced modern timekeeping from astronomy. Our timekeeping system no longer depends on the rising and setting of the sun but rather on the vibrations of atomic particles. This is the reason why we now have all sorts of leap-seconds and other newfangled contrivances — the vibration rate of cesium is constant but the length of astronomical years can vary slightly due to irregularities in the Earth’s orbit.

A sundial wristwatch: sporty and practical

Frankly, none of this would have been an issue if we’d stuck with astronomical time. Hellfire and damnation, why not just go back to sundials like we had in the good old days? Mike Cowham’s “A Dial in Your Poke” documents a myriad of portable “pocket” sundials that, unless the Earth has started to orbit a different sun, work as well today as the day they were made. You can even buy modern pocket sundials and sundial wristwatches and, unlike a smartwatch, they never need to be recharged. But for all its other faults the smartwatch is a small miracle of modern horology. People see a gizmo and they treat it like a black box — they think the story stops there. Look through it instead at the whole picture. There is an enormous global network of timekeeping technology required just to let your little smartwatch know the time. So no, we don’t hate smartwatches — we think they’re pretty nifty.

Upcoming Lecture: Retail vs. Reality: How To Get Access to the World’s Hottest Watches (At MSRP)

Yoni Ben-Yehuda, Head of Watches, Material Good (New York, New York)
March 3, 2025

The current watch market is in a fascinating state, blending traditional luxury with modern innovation and shifting consumer preferences. To understand how we got here and what the future of watch collecting looks like, especially in the U.S., it’s essential to explore the evolution of the market, the underlying factors shaping it today, and what collectors need to keep in mind when curating their collections in 2025.

At the March 2025 lecture of the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), Yoni Ben-Yehuda, Head of Watches at Material Good, will lecture on the current watch market, its evolution, and what the future of watch collecting may look like. Ben-Yehuda will offer a peek into the inner workings of the watch industry (from the retail perspective) and explore the do’s and don’ts of building a modern watch collection in 2025.

*Doors open at 5:30 PM ET, lecture to begin at 6 PM ET. RSVP is required.

** The lecture video will be available to members immediately, and to the general public following a two-month delay.

Reading Time at HSNY: Decimal Time in America

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by St John Karp. 

Whenever I start talking about decimal time, people tend to roll their eyes at me and say, “Oh there goes St John again, talking about alternative timekeeping systems.” And they’re not wrong! I love the quirky, vaguely utopian attempts to make something better than what we have, even if those ideas failed somewhere in the execution. It’s probably why I also love constructed languages such as Esperanto and Toki Pona. Eagle-eyed readers might even remember that my last post on this blog, See You in the Chat Room, was also about alternative methods of telling the time, but today I want to talk about a new find I made in the Jost Bürgi Research Library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY): an unheralded attempt at a decimal timekeeping system straight out of the United States in the 1960s.

But first let’s talk turkey. I’m not going to start with why we should have clocks with 10 hours on the dial. Why do we even have clocks with 12 hours on the dial? Whose bright idea was that? Don’t they know how much bother they would have saved everyone if they’d just started out with 10? Thankfully, “Time of Our Lives,” Sara J. Schechner’s invaluable book about sundials, tells us exactly what we need to know.

An ancient Egyptian sundial, c. 1479-1425 B.C.E.

The number 12 goes back all the way to the ancient Egyptians. There’s precious little that modern European culture gets from ancient Egypt. It’s not hard to look at classical Greek or Roman civilization and see the present reflected in it — our system of banking, our literature, and even our architecture. The culture of pharaonic Egypt was, however, largely lost over centuries of occupations and social changes. One of the most enduring legacies we get from the Egyptians is our 24-hour days. They began by dividing the night. The Egyptians recognized 36 time-telling stars, some 12 of which were visible on any given night, and so they divided the night into 12 periods based on the rising and setting of these stars. When they came to divide the day, they mirrored the number of nighttime hours. The first known Egyptian sundial dates from about 1500 B.C.E., but they probably had sundials as early as the third millennium B.C.E. They put 12 marks on their sundials and thus created the 24-hour day.

If the Egyptians ever had need of smaller units of time than an hour, they didn’t mention it. Credit for dividing the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds goes to the Mesopotamians, who must have been very insistent on punctuality if they were that obsessed with minutes and seconds. Jo Ellen Barnett in “Time’s Pendulum” writes that Mesopotamian mathematics did not support fractional quantities, so as a workaround the Mesopotamians favored using whole numbers that had a large number of even divisors. 60 is divisible by 10 smaller numbers without leaving a remainder, whereas 100 is only evenly divisible by seven other numbers. A third of an hour equal to 33 ⅓ minutes would have made the Mesopotamians cry.

According to Herodotus the Greeks inherited this system of hours and minutes from the Mesopotamians, and from Greece it’s a straight shot to the culture of modern Europe. So there you have it, from Egypt to Mesopotamia to Greece to the present day. Not that no one has ever thought about alternatives, however. The cauldron of ideas that was the French Revolution not only produced the metric system, it also produced an attempt at decimal timekeeping. Clocks had 10-hour dials, hours had 100 minutes, and minutes had 100 seconds. More recently, Swatch started producing digital watches in 1998 that divided the day into 1,000 “beats,” a system they called Internet Time. They do not make Internet Time watches anymore.

Noble H. Stibolt with wife Jeanne

In between the French Revolution and the internet, however, there was an American proposal for a decimal time-keeping system. It originated with Noble H. Stibolt (1925–2003) of Matteson, Illinois, who in 1961 published a pamphlet called “Should ‘TIME’ Be Modernized?” In it, Stibolt proposed a decimal timekeeping system he called Metrictime that built upon the principles of the metric system. As with Revolutionary time, Metrictime divided the day into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. Stibolt did not leave it there, though. In 1969 he published a follow-up pamphlet in which he took his proposal one step further and made the case for a metric calendar. This calendar featured 10 days per week, nine weeks per season, four seasons per year, and five holidays to bring the total to 365 days per year. The days of the week were named Plutoday (Pluday), Neptuneday (Nepday), Uranusday (Urday), Saturnday (Saturday), Jupiterday (Jupday), Marsday (Marday), Earthday (Erthday), Venusday (Venday), and Sunday.

Stibolt worked out his decimal time and calendar systems to an astonishing level of detail. He even went as far as having a clockmaker in Massachusetts produce prototype wall clocks and longcase clocks with 10-hour dials. HSNY’s executive director Nicholas Manousos has weighed in on the construction of these, making the point that it’s not as simple as putting a 10-hour dial on a regular clock — the entire gear train needs to be re-engineered.

The Stibolts’ metric calendar

Ever since I found Stibolt’s pamphlet I was fascinated. I had to know more. Who was this man who had led a seemingly single-handed crusade, printing his own pamphlets, designing his own calendar and timekeeping system, and then vanished? As a librarian and archivist, I couldn’t leave well alone, I had to go digging for answers. I found some traces of the Stibolts online. They were a military family so public records helped supply some background, but there wasn’t much about how this had all come about or whether any more remnants of their work had survived into the present. I was almost ready to give up until I finally made contact with a Stibolt family member who helped me unravel the puzzle of the Stibolts’ relationship with horology.

Dan Stibolt is the son of Noble H. Stibolt, whose father was named Noble Stibolt (1892–1969). Dan credits his grandfather as being the driving force behind Metrictime. The elder Noble had been a traveling salesman, but leg injuries suffered at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in World War I meant that he had trouble covering his old ground as a salesman. Instead, he went into law as an attorney. He recounted to his grandson that as a salesman he’d traveled across the country struggling to manage appointments and train schedules in different timezones, not to mention Daylight Savings casting the occasional spanner into the works. The elder Noble had been a Freemason and Dan speculates that his passion for decimal time may have been influenced by the Freemasons’ Enlightenment ideals just as the French had been inspired by the Enlightenment in their invention of the metric system during the Revolution. In 1964 the elder Noble, “a retired Chicago attorney,” was interviewed by local paper Berwyn Life.

 

Stibolt is dedicated to modernizing the time system. He points out that in a single day there are a dozen prevailing times in the United States, including military time, daylight, standard, AM, and PM, etc.

Stibolt says the only answer is to abandon the policy of dividing the world into 24 time zones and the day into 24 hours. Instead he advocates 10 time zones and a day divided in tenths, for a metric time system based on decimals. All of this country would be in one time zone. Certain areas could arise and retire earlier in summer but confusion with the clock would be ended. Timetables would be consistent, and A.M. and P.M. would be forgotten. There’d be no changing watches four times in a single transcontinental flight that may take only an hour or so.

Stibolt predicts a metric time system would save the world billions of dollars annually in wasted time and effort. Is he right? Only time can tell.

The Stibolts’ electric decimal
longcase clock

Illustration from the Stibolts’ 1969 pamphlet: “Time… in metric style.”

Dan writes that his grandfather presented his ideas to members of Congress and may even have been mentioned on The Today Show, though no evidence of these is known to survive. Noble passed away in 1969, and with him the primary impetus behind Metrictime appears to have evaporated. His son Noble H. allowed the 20-year trademark on Metrictime to expire in 1983. Likely one of the only copies of the Stibolts’ work to have survived is the copy of “Should Measure, Time and Calendar be Modernized?” that is held in HSNY’s library.

Today, time and calendar reform are regarded as slightly kooky undertakings. In 1975 the Australian evening current affairs program This Day Tonight aired an April Fool’s hoax suggesting that Australia would convert to metric time, under which hours would be called decidays, minutes would be centidays, and seconds would be millidays. In the television program Veep (2012–2019) one of the more loathsome characters bases a farcical political campaign on abolishing daylight saving time.

Noble Stibolt

It’s tempting to want to reform a system that came about by chance. No one designed it, no one asked for it, and no individual’s hand is discernible in its creation. It just sort of happened. But then consider how well this happy accident has worked for 4,000 years. If it really were that bad, surely we would have come up with an improvement by now. The fact that it just works means that maybe we lucked into the best of all worlds. Even so, the work of people like Noble and Noble H. Stibolt is nevertheless astonishing for its creativity, passion, and optimism for a different way of doing things, and that’s why I reserve the right to bore you with decimal timekeeping at parties. To me, the impractical, the strange, and the unlikely ideals of these systems remain fascinating.

Leading Auction Houses Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s Sign On To Support the Horological Society of New York

The watch industry’s three leading auction houses — Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s have joined as sponsors of the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), all supporting its mission to advance the art and science of horology. Each auction house will take turns hosting the charity auction at HSNY’s highly anticipated annual Gala, reinforcing their shared commitment to the preservation and advancement of horology, and showcasing their distinct expertise and global reach.

Founded in 1866, HSNY is the oldest horological organization in the United States and one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today it exists as a nonprofit organization and offers the public programs including watchmaking courses, lectures, and financial aid to watchmaking students and institutions. 

The annual Gala, a hallmark event celebrating the Society and the year’s accomplishments, draws brands, industry leaders, enthusiasts, and collectors from around the globe. The proceeds from these auctions will directly benefit HSNY’s educational programs, scholarships, and horological preservation initiatives. 

“This news represents a shared dedication and pledge to the watchmaking industry,” said HSNY Executive Director Nicholas Manousos. “Having Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s supporting and hosting our annual charity auction fosters a spirit of unity and innovation that we can all admire.”

Christie’s will host the charity auction at HSNY’s 159th anniversary Gala taking place at the iconic Plaza Hotel on Saturday, March 22, 2025. The charity auction will include unique and rare timepieces, VIP experiences, and of course, HSNY’s coveted Lifetime Membership Card. (Full charity auction details to be announced soon.)

In addition to their annual gala commitment, Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s support HSNY as sponsors whose annual donations help meet the Society’s mission. All three auction houses will be in attendance at HSNY’s Gala in March, offering attendees the unique opportunity to network and mingle with each. 

Details and tickets to the 2025 Gala are available via https://hs-ny.org/2025-gala.

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

HSNY Welcomes Jacob & Co. As a Sponsor

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) announces luxury Swiss watch brand Jacob & Co. has joined as a sponsor.

Jacob & Co. is driven by creativity and inspired by the impossible. Since his earliest beginnings in watches and jewelry, Founder Jacob Arabo has designed the industry's most iconic and innovative products. Today, Jacob & Co. reflects his immutable spirit and insatiable desire to produce beautiful works of art the world has never seen before.

A company with deep New York City roots like HSNY, Jacob & Co. signs on to support the Society in its mission to advance the art and science of horology, which includes promoting horological education through curriculum expansion, increasing financial aid opportunities, supporting 159 years of lectures, and much more.

HSNY welcomes Jacob & Co. and thanks them for their incredible support!

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

HSNY Elects New Officers, 2025

NEW YORK — January 16, 2025 — The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) announces the election of new officers for 2025. This leadership transition underscores HSNY's commitment to fostering excellence and innovation in the field of horology. The newly elected officers bring a wealth of expertise and a shared vision for the Society’s mission of advancing the art and science of horology. Their collective efforts will continue to strengthen HSNY's legacy of education, preservation, and community engagement within the horological community. HSNY extends its gratitude to the outgoing officers for their invaluable contributions.

William Buchalter was elected HSNY’s 39th President, succeeding John Teifert (2020-2024). Buchalter works as Managing Principal and Co-Chairman at Capital Growth Buchalter.

Eneuri Acosta was elected HSNY’s Vice President, succeeding John Davis (2020-2024). Acosta previously worked as Chief Brand Officer at HODINKEE, Inc.

Brett Walsdorf was elected HSNY’s Treasurer for a second term. Walsdorf works as a licensed Associate Real Estate Broker at Compass.

In addition, four new Trustees were elected:

David Chang — Partner at Wellington Management, Board Member at Steppingstone, and Trustee at Tufts University.

Amit Puri — President & CEO of Kurtek and PMG. Board member at Inova Foundation, Costello College of Business at George Mason University and Space@VT at Virginia Tech.

Brian Robinson — Partner at Goldman Sachs and Trustee at the Guggenheim Museum.

Ellen Sorensen — President, Americas at ZENITH Watches.

Eight previously serving HSNY Trustees were re-elected:

Mark Armenante — Software Founder and Independent Watch Collector.

Paul Boutros — Deputy Chairman and Head of Watches, Americas for Phillips.

Romain Gauthier — Swiss independent watchmaker.

Aldis Hodge — Founder and CEO of A. Hodge Atelier, Film and TV Producer, and SAG Award-winning actor.

Eric Ku — Founder, Ten Past Ten Timepieces and Los Angeles Watchworks.

Briana Le — American independent watchmaker.

Lenise Logan — President at Kalpa Art Advisory.

Roger Smith — British independent watchmaker.

“The Horological Society of New York holds a unique place in the history of horology as the longest continuously operating guild in America,” said HSNY President William Buchalter. “But even more exciting than our history is our future. Together with all stakeholders, we have the unique ability to advance the art and science of horology on a global scale. Our Board of Trustees is diverse, experienced, capable, and motivated to accomplish our mission.”

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world.
http://hs-ny.org

HSNY Opens "Early American Pocket Watches" Exhibit (2025)

Showcasing The Beginnings Of American Horological History

John Wright, New York (c. 1715)

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY), America’s oldest watchmaking guild, founded in 1866, announces today “Early American Pocket Watches,” a revolutionary exhibit showcasing a collection of pocket watches that helped shape the history of timekeeping in early America. The exhibit officially opens on January 9 and will be on display through December 2025.

“Early American Pocket Watches” is made possible with the help of antiquarian horologist Richard Newman, who has spent decades preserving American horological history and now shares it for the world to see. The 42-piece curated collection spans 125 years and includes the earliest known American-signed watch (c. 1715), some of the country’s earliest known watch papers, and only-known examples in a variety of categories. “Early American Pocket Watches” timepieces were made and retailed on American soil and include examples made during Colonial America, the Revolution, and the Federal era. 

Joshua Lockwood, Charleston, SC (1763)

Joshua Lockwood, Charleston, SC (1763)

“HSNY’s “Early American Pocket Watches” exhibit is a celebration of the ingenuity and craftsmanship that shaped American horology,” said HSNY Executive Director Nicholas Manousos. “Newman’s collection offers a rare opportunity to connect with the stories and innovations that defined a pivotal era in watchmaking history.”

The exhibit, on show at HSNY’s Jost Bürgi Research Library in Manhattan, includes rare timepieces from renowned makers such as Moses Morse, Robert Leslie, and Samuel G. Jones. Today, these important examples provide a glimpse into the lives of those who relied on these precision instruments during a time when a watch was one of the most expensive consumer goods one could buy.

In conjunction with the exhibit, Newman will give a lecture on Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 6PM ET, guiding HSNY’s audience on a journey through the beginnings of an era that laid the foundations for the American watch industry. 

Jordan Mott & Son, New York (1831)

Early American watch papers

The 2025 exhibit is also complemented by a fully illustrated catalog with photography by Atom Moore that captures intricate engravings, delicate watch papers, and mechanical movements manufactured throughout the Colonies. The print catalog is available for purchase in-person and online and is available for free digitally on the HSNY website.

“Early American Pocket Watches” is open to the public Monday through Friday from 10AM to 5PM. Admission is free. HSNY is located at 20 West 44th Street, Suite 501, New York, NY 10036. Learn more at https://hs-ny.org/exhibits.

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world.

http://hs-ny.org

HSNY President's Letter, 2024

Dear HSNY Supporters,

Many of you know that my annual letter typically reflects on time and timelines. This year, I want to focus on the present — where we are now and where I hope HSNY will go.

My term as President concludes at the end of this year. Serving in this role has been a profound honor and a deeply humbling experience. One of the most humbling aspects has been being part of an organization that has awarded close to $700,000 in financial aid to 79 watchmaking students during my tenure. I extend my heartfelt thanks to each of you for your trust and support. I also thank HSNY’s Board of Trustees for electing me a lifetime Fellow of the Society. I look forward to continuing my involvement and contributing to the field that has been my lifelong passion and the foundation of my current career.

Watchmaking has been a career for many over the centuries, and it was mine for two decades. It is because of my experience as a watchmaker that I have been able to spend the last three years applying those skills to building a Space Instrument for the upcoming NASA IMAP mission. To the watchmakers reading this, I hope my experience helps you appreciate your incredible talent and inspires you to realize that you can achieve anything you set your mind to.

To those who work with watchmakers, I encourage you to consider how you can enhance your team’s value. There has long been a shortage of watchmakers, a situation exacerbated by stagnant compensation. Talented individuals capable of succeeding at the bench often find more lucrative opportunities in other fields. I have met more retired doctors, lawyers, and engineers at watch and clock collecting events than anywhere else. Those who build a career at the bench deserve praise for the work they do. Watchmakers who add sales, business, electronics, or engineering to their unique skillset should surprise no one. The talent needed to become a successful watchmaker is significant and can be applied to as many endeavors as you can imagine.

HSNY has not always been as successful as it is today. While we enjoyed a long period of success, I personally remember when HSNY had fewer than  20 members in 2003. Today, we have nearly 2,000 members and continue to grow. We broadened the Society’s mission to advance the art and science of horology, inviting collectors, enthusiasts, and industry professionals to join us in a way that had not been tried before. The results speak for themselves.

The history of watchmaking is filled with brilliant ideas that failed, not due to a lack of technical skill, but because of insufficient business acumen. We know that watchmakers do not exist in a vacuum. When the Society embraced a broader vision of its mission, it was able to help more watchmakers than ever before. Our goal remains to do even more to preserve and expand the number of people who carry the know-how of watchmaking into the future.

Leading an organization recovering from the brink with a modest budget is vastly different from knowing how to skillfully leverage seven figures annually. We are now in a position to begin building an endowment that has the potential to ensure our survival indefinitely. We continue to improve our library, expand traveling education, and plan to offer more scholarships each year. We also have exciting ideas for how HSNY can become a true incubator for independent horology. Stay tuned for details.

I would be remiss if I did not thank my old and dear friend John Davis, whom I have known for a very long time. John and I joined HSNY at the same time, and his contributions are significant. We have enjoyed our time as officers. I thank him for his collaboration as my VP and I congratulate him on his own induction as a Fellow of HSNY.

With that, I am pleased to introduce you to Bill Buchalter, HSNY’s 39th president and the first president from “the other side of the bench.” Bill will begin his term with the new year, and his financial savvy will be complemented by his VP, Eneuri Acosta’s talents. Both will benefit from Brett Walsdorf’s continued contributions as Treasurer.

Your incoming officers have the skills, talent, and experience to lead HSNY forward. Eight of our trustees remain on board and now have the backing of four new trustees (alphabetically): Amit Puri, Brian Robinson, David Chang, and Ellen Sorenson. Everyone involved has a deep respect for the craft and craftspeople of horology. I am confident they will serve you all very well and wish them and HSNY enormous success.

We are where we are today because of our growing membership and generous sponsors. We deeply appreciate all you have done to get us here. Thanks also to the many non-members who have attended our lectures and visited our library. We hope 2025 is the year you decide to become a member, donate, or volunteer your time in support of the community.

To everyone reading this, I wish you happy holidays and all the best for the New Year.

- John Teifert
President, Horological Society of New York
 

LIFETIME MEMBERS
Jared Tramontano (2022)
Benjamin A. Nelson (2023)
David Farmer (2024)

GOLD LEVEL MEMBERS
Alexandre Tilly
Amirali Ebrahimi
Andy Russo
Anthony Parziale
Antoine Salles
Basil Wilson
BK Fulton
Chi Chan
Christopher McNew
Clark Barwick
David Wertheimer
Dustin Tsitouris
Eric Graber-Lopez
Fatih Taskiran
Geoffrey Hess
Gerardo Estevez
Gregory R. Michael
H. Jane Chon
Hamed Alaghebandian
James Mercer
Jason Kim
Jeffrey P. Hess
Jhaveri Milind Harendra
Jim Norris
Joan Valerie Castro
John A. Davis
John Hoffman
John Nichols
John Warren
Jonathan Grau
Justin Werner
Kevin Wong
Matthew Connor
Michael Ansman
Michael Chiaramonte
Michael Kalb
Michael T. Jewell
Michael Williams
Nico McVicar
Nishant Patel
Paul Boutros
Paul N. Morrissette
Phillip Tiongson
Prachi Gauriar
Richard Duckett Jr.
Robert May
Robert Paolucci
Rupa Dainer
Scott B. Thistle
Scott Schenker
Sean Bedford
Sean Cahill
Simon Jeffs
Stuart Daniel Shanler
Ted Friedland
Thomas M. Lubeck
Todd Parker
William H. Julien

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The list above includes members with active, recurring Gold memberships

Reading Time at HSNY: Booked and Busy in 2024

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was jointly written by Miranda Marraccini and St John Karp. 

Happy New Year from the Horological Society of New York’s Jost Bürgi Research Library! At the end of December, as a light snow fell over our headquarters on 44th Street in Manhattan, coating our elaborate ironwork fire escape, the library was bustling with holiday tourists. The end of the year gave us a chance to celebrate how far we’ve come since the modern library’s grand opening in 2022–the time has flown!

Our library has grown from just an exciting idea at the beginning of the pandemic to a thriving, functioning resource and social hub for people interested in all facets of horology. In the last year, we more than doubled our visitor count: 776 people visited in 2023, while 1,710 people visited the library in 2024. 

St John Karp

Of course, with this explosion in library use, we needed to expand our staff. We hired St John Karp as a part-time intern in January, and quickly promoted him to full-time, first as Assistant Librarian, and now as Librarian. St John’s hard work has enabled us to expand our services for members, visitors, and researchers (image 1).

Library patrons in 2024 visited for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes no reason at all, and all were welcome! Many of the people who use our library are walk-ins, who see our sign on the street (image 2). We love introducing tourists to our world, and we never mind explaining what the word “horology” means.

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We’ve had researchers learning about watches that they inherited, creative writers and artists, academics studying the philosophy of time, and aspiring watch designers looking for source material. We’ve helped people apply to watchmaking schools, and we’ve offered current watchmaking students resources to further their studies.

This year, library visitors enjoyed our exhibit “The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko,” featuring Japanese timekeepers from 19th-century wadokei through to Seiko’s 21st-century wristwatches (see the cover from our exhibit catalog, image 3). Some of these have never been exhibited outside Japan. The Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ (the first quartz watch) and the Grand Seiko 3180 (the first Grand Seiko) were particular favorites with our visitors.

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Some of our most rewarding visits have been from students. Jeff Feddersen teaches a class through New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program simply called “Time.” It’s a wide-ranging course that covers “historical clock and orrery design through modern computer architecture.” Every year, Feddersen’s students visit HSNY where they tour our space, learn about horological history, and conduct research. We’re displaying some of their final projects in a showcase exhibit right now; they are inventive mechanical and software clocks that tell time in novel ways (image 4).

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With all of the developments, we knew our library was growing quickly and would soon need an online platform that could accommodate all our plans. To that end, we migrated to a new catalog that’s more accessible and modern, and allows for sophisticated management of all our library’s data. In the Fall, the whole HSNY team gathered around the table for an intense migration session the likes of which have not been seen since the Apollo 11 space program. We especially needed to make this change because (drumroll please):

We’re now allowing members to check out books from the library! This is the first time we’ve allowed books to circulate, and it’s something we’ve been planning for years. Members can now check out books for six weeks and bring them home, and there’s nary a late fee in sight. Better yet, visiting members don’t even have to live in New York to check out books — as long as they can pick them up in person, they can mail them back to us. 

As another service to our patrons, we’re also selling some books when we have extra copies. These range from paperbacks full of handy horological tips to prestigious exhibition catalogs and collectible watchmakers’ manuals.

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But we're not downsizing the collection. We continue to expand when new books are published, or when new finds are available. In 2024, we acquired over 40 new books for the collection, including 16 rare books from the magnificent library of the late scholar and historian Silvio Bedini. Pictured in image 5, the newly anointed oldest book in our collection, printed in Italy in 1573, is on view in our rare books case.

For those of you who might be unable to be here in our library in person, we also wrote 11 articles about the collection this year! We covered topics ranging from mystery novels to Olympic timing to the ever-popular erotic watches, and more!

We can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2025! After a holiday break, we reopen for the year on January 2. Shortly afterward we’ll be installing our next fantastic exhibit–stay tuned for the details!

Reading Time at HSNY: From Chiming to Rhyming

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our head librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The mouse ran up the clock.

The clock struck one,

And down he run.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

For many readers, these singsong lines will trigger some deep fragment of memory, maybe a cloudy scene at a preschool or the embrace of a grandparent’s warm lap. There are many versions of the rhyme; this one is from “The Completed Hickory Dickory Dock” (image 1). Nursery rhymes, songs, and poems often have a resonance beyond their literal meaning. Here in our library at the Horological Society of New York, we have a number of books of poetry about time and timekeepers. Some of it is funny or satirical, some thoughtful, some melancholy, but all of it tells us something about the ways people reckon with time and its limits.

Image 1

Time, for watchmakers, is a concrete thing, both something to be precisely parceled out, and a livelihood. From its founding in 1866, HSNY members used songs, first in German and later in English, to bond over the difficulties and joys of watchmaking. In one of my previous posts, I quoted from an original song called “Watchmaker’s Smiles” that HSNY members sang together at their gala in 1918. The lyrics covered topics of special interest to watchmakers, like the recent popularity of “bracelet watches” or wristwatches, but also broader current events of the day like prohibition and women’s suffrage. A similar song from a 1916 gala laments the financial position of watchmakers:

While the crowd goes chasing madly

The mighty dollar bill.

Watchmakers often paid but badly,

Straining muscle, nerve, and will.

When a slick watch salesman “hypnotize[s]” his buyer into an expensive but low-quality imported watch, the watchmaker must nonetheless try to service it:

Watchmaker swears blue damnation

When he has to make it run.

All parts either bind or wabble,

Screws most overturn,

‘Scapement, depthings, all give trouble,

Rotten is the whole concern.

HSNY members used poetry, in this case set to the melody of a popular song, to express their common frustrations. Singing together probably helped them recover from the daily tensions of their jobs.

Image 2

The watchmakers of HSNY would have been familiar with the main character's pain in “Der Uhrmacher unter dem Werktisch,” the title poem in a German-language collection of poems in our library (image 2). The title translates to “The Watchmaker Under the Workbench” and the poem begins dramatically, with a first line reading, in rough translation: “Every day the same horror.” The watchmaker has dropped something on the ground and is searching for it. He is “constantly on his knees” as if he were praying; “He swears that he alone is a tormented being.” The exaggerated pathos of the scene makes it funny; in the original German, I’m sure it’s even funnier.

Unusually for the poetry books in our library, this volume is actually all about the trials and tribulations of watchmaking–not an abstract story about the passage of time or a rumination on mortality. Other translated titles of poems in this book include “The Regulator,” “The Balance Shaft,” and “A ‘Capable’ Assistant” (the last poem is an ironic lament about a dishonest employee.)

The watchmaker above has only himself to blame for dropping a screw under his bench, but other poems in our collection are more spiteful. A puzzling example occurs in the verse autobiography of 19th-century Shaker clockmaker Isaac Newton Youngs, who recounts an experience in his childhood: 

‘Twas here that I did undertake

A little wooden clock to make,

But Abigail Richardson

Burnt it all up–for her own fun.

Who was this Abigail, now memorialized centuries after her death as a malicious clock-destroyer whose name, spit out like a curse, interrupts the singsong rhythm of the poem? What’s her side of the story? I couldn’t find much information about this little anecdote, which is reprinted on the back cover of “Shaker Clock Makers,” a pamphlet in our library. Youngs’ autobiography was never published and survives as a manuscript in the Winterthur Museum Garden & Library.

A number of anthologists have attempted to collect together literary quotations about clocks and watches; one in our collection is “An Anthology of Clocks and Watches” by C. A. O. Fox (image 3). Fox covers horological poetry chronologically, from Dante’s Divine Comedy up to the book’s publication date, 1947. His selection demonstrates the omnipresence of timekeeping in cultural life, both literally and metaphorically. For instance, from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Act II Scene 1: 

Image 3

Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit;

By and by it will strike.

The line demonstrates that by 1611, when “The Tempest” debuted onstage, audiences were already familiar with a watch and how it worked; they knew how to wind one; and they knew about the concept of a repeater that tells the time audibly.

Many of the lines in Fox’s selection are quoted anonymously, and might have appeared in local magazines and newspapers, so this book may be one of the few places you can read them today. Otherwise, where would you come across the immortal poem “The Find” about buying a clock that was “not a bargain” but looked like “a real antique”? The speaker shows the clock to an expert for a high fee, and here’s his assessment:

His verdict gave my pride a bump,

He said “You’ve been a silly chump,

You’d better chuck it on the dump.”

Who among us has not been humbled by a deceptive flea market find? It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s still a memorable and relatable poem.

Image 4

Another anthology in our library, “Los Números del Tiempo,” or “The Numbers of Time,” is a Spanish-language collection of poetry and riddles from the 15th Century to today. It includes a “poetic clock,” with 24 quotations, one for each hour of the day. (The concept is not unlike the Author Clock that I mentioned in a previous article about mystery novels.) In a poem called “The Discord of Watches” from the 18th century, a group of four friends arrive at different times for a banquet, leading to an argument about whose watch is accurate (see the accompanying illustration in image 4). One of the friends finally settles it by breaking out the telescope and using the stars to calculate the time.

Several books in our collection attempt to preserve aphorisms, epigraphs, and sayings about time–not all of them strictly poetry. “Nimm dir Zeit,” or “Take Your Time,” is one such anthology in German. The author, Klaus Fritz, has assembled “quotes, aphorisms and poems by philosophers, writers, scientists, poets and thinkers” to “encourage people to think about time from time to time.” Although there is naturally a bias toward German thinkers, there are some surprising names in the volume, like Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, John Steinbeck, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of “The Little Prince”). 

The illustrations by Rolf Krämer add a touch of sinister surreality to the relatively mundane text of many of the quotations. As in the case of poetry, the meaning of visual art is open to interpretation. However, I would venture that image 5 shows someone hiding their awareness of the constant tick-tock of mortality behind a mask of happiness, while a watch counts the dwindling minutes of their life. In image 6...well, I think it’s something about the human life cycle. I see some sperm approaching eggs, a couple coupling, and a tree ornamented with human heads of various ages from baby to skull. 

Image 5

Image 6

While the volume above seems deliberately unsettling, verses in our collection more typically recount the soothing rhythms of life. One of these books, called “Die Ammen-Uhr,” or “The Nurse’s Clock,” illustrates this beautiful mundanity. All of the engravings are from a single artist working in Dresden in 1842, although this book was published later; each image portrays a stanza of the same short poem. It begins with a child crying at midnight. In the cover illustration, image 7, a concerned-looking mother, or possibly a wet nurse, tries to soothe her swaddled, screaming baby as the large clock behind her strikes midnight. I don’t blame the child for screaming, as the bell hanging in the tower above them looks extremely loud.

Image 7

Image 8

It’s not just people who live according to a strict schedule. In the poem, we also hear about swallows, mice, horses, and roosters. In a detail in image 8, at three in the morning, a carriage driver wakes from his straw bed on the floor, which he shares with a cat (eating a rodent breakfast) and a dog (leisurely scratching his ear). As in all the illustrations, a clock shows the time. You can faintly see the pendulum swinging, as well as the weights hanging from the movement.

These routines are all artificially regulated by the clock. When these engravings were commissioned, clocks could still be expensive consumer goods in Europe, and it seems like there could be a bit of poetic license in the depictions, since the people in this poem, even the poorest, have a working clock available in every room of the house.

Image 9

In my favorite illustration in the book (image 9), a woman, probably a servant, gets scolded for not yet being out of bed at the late hour of six: “The bell strikes six / Get up, get up you lazy witch!” The lazy witch yawns, seemingly unconcerned, but in the next stanza she dutifully runs to the bakery (with the family dog in tow) to buy bread.

Finally, at the end of the poem, the women of the family prepare a hearty breakfast of rolls, butter, sugar, milk, and soup. The dog nips at the servant’s heels as she carries the bowl of hot liquid. The child strains toward his meal as another woman ties a bib around his neck. Everyone is warm; food is plentiful; steam rises in the kitchen behind them.

Ironically, for a book poem about time, the message and the illustrations are timeless. All of us live by the clock, going about our routines, waking up tired and grumpy, doing what we have to do to get through the day. The predictable meter of the poem mirrors the clock’s tick-tock, moving forward at the same steady, reassuring pace.

I’ll close with a couple of lines from one of my favorite poems about the human experience of time, “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

   Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Thomas writes about our awareness of time–the truism that the less time we have left, the more we dwell on it. When we’re children, we don’t think about the limits of our mortal lives, because those limits seem so far off as to be irrelevant. When we’re older, the idea of time passing too quickly seems omnipresent. It isn’t necessarily bad, just part of being human. Somehow we learn to live with the knowledge of our allotted time, laughing over our little jokes, scribbling our sad poems. We sing in our chains like the sea.

HSNY To Celebrate 159th Anniversary With Gala at the Plaza Hotel (March 22, 2025)

Saturday, March 22, 2025

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY), America’s oldest watchmaking guild, founded in 1866, announces today its 159th anniversary Gala, taking place on Saturday, March 22, 2025, at the iconic Plaza Hotel in New York City. This milestone event will bring together top watch brands, horology enthusiasts, industry leaders, and collectors to celebrate the Society’s rich history and its ongoing mission to advance the art and science of horology.

HSNY’s annual Gala is a glamorous evening filled with fine dining, scholarships for watchmaking students, and a live auction showcasing exceptional timepieces. 

The Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, where dinner will take place.

Celebrating HSNY's 159th anniversary at the Plaza Hotel — one of New York City’s most iconic landmarks — promises to be an unforgettable night. This historic venue, rich with over a century of elegance and grandeur, provides the perfect backdrop for honoring the enduring art and science of horology. The Plaza Hotel is a National Historic Landmark, a New York City Landmark, and is well known for Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, held in 1966. With an overwhelming demand for tickets at previous Galas, the Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom will make it possible to double the number of HSNY members, sponsors, and friends in attendance.

Event Details:

  • Date: Saturday, March 22, 2025

  • Time: 6:00 PM - 11:00 PM

  • Location: The Plaza Hotel, 768 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

  • Dress Code: Black Tie

Tickets for the Gala will be available for purchase on the following schedule:

  • Gold Tier Members: Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 12:00 PM ET

  • Silver Tier Members: Thursday, November 14, 2024, 12:00 PM ET

  • Bronze Tier Members: Tuesday, November 19, 2024, 12:00 PM ET

  • General Public: Thursday, November 21, 2024, 12:00 PM ET

Table reservations (10 seats) are available. Contact info@hs-ny.org for details.

A portion of each Gala ticket sale is tax-deductible and all proceeds from the evening will support HSNY’s educational initiatives, including scholarships for aspiring watchmakers and public outreach programs.

HSNY Gala, 2024

ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

Reading Time at HSNY: Our Original Library

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our head librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

Regular readers of this column probably know all about our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), which we officially opened only two years ago. We unveiled a gilded sign! We cut a ribbon with giant scissors! It was a big deal. But did you know that HSNY has always had a library? Early members viewed books as essential to their work and made the book collection a priority from the start. As with watchmaking, library practices of the 19th century have a lot in common with those of today.

Image 1

HSNY was founded in March 1866 by a group of German immigrants. Known as the Deutscher Uhrmacher Verein (German Watchmakers’ Society), it included only working watchmakers. Members paid into a fund that would support them if they were unable to work.

A history written in 1916 reports that the Society had a “technical library” within a few years of its founding. Image 1 shows an early library stamp, in blue, that marks a book called “The Watchmakers’ Library” as property of the New Yorker Urmacher Verein–a name we used from 1887 until around 1916. The German-style tulip ornament and oval shape lend the stamp a bit of decorative flair.

In our archives, a card printed around 1887 in German mentions that the Society keeps a “specialized library…open at no charge to all members…one of the most complete in the German language. It also contains almost all the more recently published technical literature in the English language and is being added to regularly” (images 2 and 3). 

Image 2

Image 3

Since most members still spoke German as a primary language at this time, and all meetings were conducted in German, the Society took pains to collect books that would be helpful and readable. But the reference on this card to recent literature in English suggests that things were starting to change. By 1930, English was the primary language of the newly rebranded Horological Society of New York.

Other, sporadic documentation shows the library continued to grow and evolve in the following decades: by 1891, HSNY boasted $365 in books and periodicals, equivalent to around $12,000 or $13,000 in today’s money. In 1901 a member donated a collection of 215 technical books.

Below are lists of books in our library from the 1940s (image 4) and the 1960s (image 5). We have multiple copies of these lists in our archives, which were frequently added to and annotated. Sometimes a book was marked as missing or damaged or restricted from circulation because of its delicate condition.

Image 4

Image 5

In the mid-20th century, HSNY’s books were mostly technical. Some example titles from these lists are: Moritz Immisch, “Prize Essay on the Balance Spring” (1872); R. H. Playtner, “An Analysis of the Lever Escapement” (1895); and Walter Kleinlein, “Rules and Practice for Adjusting Watches” (1920). Later on, the library added more modern titles including B. Humbert, “The Chronograph, its Mechanism and Repair (1953), and multiple books about newer technologies including F. Hope-Jones, “Electrical Timekeeping” (1949).

During most of HSNY’s history, until the last few years, the position of librarian was filled by a volunteer member. Although we have no record of how the librarian chose new books or how they organized the collection, a notice in 1955 bragged about having “library of congress index cards,” a system for cataloging we still use today (although we now use an online catalog rather than physical cards).

Where were the books stored? The library was never stationary–it moved through different rented rooms, mostly in hotels, just as the meeting location for the Society changed every year or two. HSNY always strived for convenience for members, which meant meeting them where they worked. Some locations were in lower Manhattan and later in Midtown as the center of the jewelry trade shifted from Maiden Lane to 47th Street. The library was open for use only on days when members were having a meeting, which was once a month. Members could check out books, except during the summer. 

You can see the evidence for the library’s continued relevance to members in our monthly newsletter, “The Horologist’s Loupe.” This HSNY publication has been going since 1938 and is still sent out every month, although now by email. (You can access all past issues on our website.) A quotation from the May 1966 edition of “The Horologist’s Loupe” intones: “This is YOUR library and it is here to help you with any problems.” Images 6 and 7, from the October 1964 and March 1968 issues respectively, remind readers of both the “precious” and “important” nature of the library and of its rules. 

Image 6

Image 7

Returning library books was a problem from the start. Even I, as a librarian, struggle with this today–sorry, New York Public Library, I am a serial offender! In “The Horologist’s Loupe,” almost every issue urges members to return library materials. For example, in May 1964: “Our Librarian would like to remind all members who borrowed books that these have to be returned at the following meeting. A fine of 25 cents to $1.00 will be charged for books kept longer than 1 month, depending on the type and age of the book…[Books] are for your benefit kept in the safe, but readily available on request.” 

We no longer keep our books in a safe, although I can assure you they are safe. More excitingly, we have just begun lending out books again to HSNY members! If you’re an active member in good standing, you can now check out up to four books at a time by visiting our library in New York, and either return them in person, or mail them back when you’re done. There are no late fees!

Image 8

Of course we know that when we lend out books, they don’t always come back exactly the same as when they left. Many of you know that I’m obsessed with readers’ marks in books. Not in a disapproving, punitive way–in fact, I love finding evidence of how readers loved these books, sometimes until they were falling apart. I think it shows how the book lived, its uses in the workshop or at home, and how people valued it. 

For example, the first inscription in image 8 reads: “from B. Mellenhoff to Max, 3/13/44.” Benjamin Mellenhoff was President of the Horological Society in 1936-1937. Max Epstein was an instructor at the Bulova School and a frequent lecturer. In the second inscription you can see what happened 11 years later. Mrs. Max Epstein donated the book, “Modern Watch Repairing and Adjusting,” to the Horological Society in memory of her beloved husband in March 1955. She knew how much the Society meant to Max, and wanted his legacy to be the continued support of other watchmakers, in this case through the library collection.

Image 9

Image 9 shows some other stamps and inscriptions in our books. Henry Fried, who wrote the message in cursive at the center top of the image, was an HSNY president in the 1940s and 50s who authored 14 books on watchmaking and taught in the New York City public schools. In a copy of his own book, “The Watch Repairer’s Manual” he insisted: “May this remain in circulation for a long time” (emphasis his). And it has! Readers can still access Fried’s book in our library in 2024, along with thousands of others, and will be able to continue to read it into its second century.

For some time between the 1960s and the 1990s, our books resided at the Bulova School in Queens, NY. When the school closed, HSNY member and former Trustee and Treasurer Charles Solomon rushed over with a van to save the books from being thrown out.

Image 10

Solomon’s beautiful Riverside Memorial Chapel served as the Society’s meeting place from 1995 through 2016. Image 10 is a picture of the books that were stored in a closet at the chapel. You can see that in addition to the older books, a number of more recent volumes have joined, including a lot of Bulova technical manuals and material on repairing quartz watches.

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Along with our other librarian, St John Karp, I’ve been reconstructing HSNY’s original library. We’ve found more than 100 books from the original lists so far. You can see some in the library in image 11, as well as in the header image of this article, with their original numbered labels on the spine. If you ever find a book with one of our stamps out in the wild, please let us know, because we’d love to know more about our history!

Since this article focused on HSNY’s original library, I won’t go into detail about everything that’s happened since Fortunat Mueller-Maerki donated his massive collection to HSNY a few years ago. We’ve grown into a world-class research library with reference services, open to the public, and we’ve helped everyone from watchmaking students to novelists to people researching family heirlooms. You can learn about the start of this new era in the first post I wrote for this site back in 2022, but so much has happened since then that I may have to write a Part Two of this article. As a librarian, I feel that I’m carrying on a practical, tangible legacy. I try to keep the knowledge in circulation, as Henry Fried would say–not just the physical books, but what they represent to watchmakers of the past and future. 

HSNY Unveils "The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko" Exhibit

*Update as of 11/18: The last day of the exhibit will be Friday, December 20, 2024.

On Display Through December 2024 

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY), America’s oldest watchmaking guild, founded in 1866, announces today the opening of its 2024 exhibit, "The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko". This unique exhibit offers a fascinating journey through the evolution, artistry, and intricate craftsmanship of Japanese timekeeping through the lens of Seiko and Grand Seiko with a collection that spans centuries.

Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ (1969)

"The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko" exhibit features specially curated timepieces that have never left The Seiko Museum Ginza until now, beginning with wadokei from the early 19th century to the first Japanese wristwatch (Seikosha Laurel), the world’s first watch that used a quartz crystal (Seiko Quartz Astron), and Grand Seiko’s first model (Grand Seiko 3180).

Now on display at HSNY’s Jost Bürgi Research Library, the exhibit allows visitors the rare opportunity to explore the intricate designs and technological advancements that helped put Japan on the horological map, including revolutionary railroad watches, self-winding chronographs, Olympic timers, the first wristwatch with an audio recording function, and of course, Spring Drive.

Brass Inro Wadokei (early 19th century)

Timepieces on display were carefully hand-delivered from their permanent home at The Seiko Museum Ginza, a six-story time capsule showcasing archives from one of Japan’s most important watch brands. Additional timepieces from the personal collection of Joseph Kirk, Brand Curator and Director of Marketing, Grand Seiko Corporation of America, complete the 25-item exhibit. This marks the first time many of the timepieces have been on loan. 

Seikosha Laurel (1913)

Grand Seiko 3180 (1960)

“Our aim with "The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko" exhibit is to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the evolution of these famous brands,” said Nicholas Manousos, HSNY Executive Director. “We wish to thank our friends at Seiko and Grand Seiko for entrusting us with the care of their treasures and for helping us to meet our mission of advancing the art and science of horology.”

"The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko" catalog

"The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko" exhibit is complemented by a fully illustrated catalog, which includes original photography by Atom Moore and a preface by Brice Le Troadec, President, Grand Seiko Corporation of America, and Global Strategy Officer, Seiko Watch Corporation. The print catalog is available for purchase in-person and online, and is available for free digitally on the HSNY website.

"The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko" is open to the public Monday through Friday from 10AM to 5PM. Admission is free. HSNY is located at 20 West 44th Street, Suite 501, New York, NY 10036. Learn more at https://hs-ny.org/exhibits.

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world.

http://hs-ny.org

Reading Time at HSNY: The Clockmaker in the Library With the Winding Key

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

Happy Horror-ological Halloween! Last year in honor of this spooky season I wrote about watches that kill, uncanny automata, and goblins of Swiss watchmaking. I featured a recent novel called “Death Watch,” in which a watch that might just be capable of severing its wearer’s wrist becomes the “must-have accessory for end-time capitalism.”

This year I’m focusing on other mystery novels and thrillers in our library collection at the Horological Society of New York–which includes fiction! Not long ago, I was given a gift of an Author Clock, which displays the time using different literary quotations for each minute of the day. For instance, a line from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” that appears on the face of the clock at 3 p.m. reads: “At three o’clock precisely I was at Baker Street, but Holmes had not yet returned.” 

Perusing the quotations as the Author Clock cycled through them reminded me that accurate timekeeping is especially important in mystery or crime novels, since witnesses and investigators often need to reconstruct a series of fatal events. For instance, in the Agatha Christie book below, a chapter begins: “To use police terms: at 2:59 P.M on September 9th, I was proceeding along Wilbraham Crescent in a westerly direction.”

Many adults who come into the library ask me fondly if we have mystery classics from their childhood like the first Nancy Drew novel, “The Secret of the Old Clock”–and we do! In the story, Nancy, the intrepid daughter of a criminal defense attorney, tries to do a good deed by finding a missing will whose contents will aid a deserving family. She pursues her investigative aim, and some thieves who get involved later, through a combination of quick thinking and even quicker driving. 

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To reveal the location of the missing will would not be in the spirit of mystery writing, but suffice it to say it involves a clock of this description: an “old fashioned mantel clock…it had a square face and the top was ornamented with a crescent.” We have a few editions, but our 1950s-era copy has a charming cover (image 1) showing one rendering of the mantel clock. In this version, the clock is lying in tall grass with its dial taken off, but you can see it better in the 1987 edition’s cover (image 2). 

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The flyleaf inside the 1950s edition contains the signature of one Sandra Hoksch, who received it for Christmas in 1955. Sandra, or one of the book’s later owners, carefully marked every book in the series she had read (image 3). I love to find readers’ marks in books, and I think of the people who wrote in our books like ghosts on the page, reading over our shoulders, waiting for our laugh, our scream of delight or terror. Sandra might not be a literal ghost, and if she sees this, I encourage her to contact us! But either way, her childhood note connects her materially to our 21st-century library and its readers.

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At the time of its original publication, the boy-equivalent of Nancy was of course the Hardy Boys. One Hardy Boys mystery in our collection at HSNY is “While the Clock Ticked,” originally published 1932. The climax of the story involves a time bomb attached to a grandfather clock. The scene makes use of the dramatic tension of the “inexorable swinging of the clock’s pendulum as the minutes ticked by.” Our copy, the revised 1962 edition, deploys the clock scene right on the cover (image 4). 

Sometimes stopped clocks in mystery novels are evidence of an event happening at a precise time, like someone’s death. In the first few pages of “The Clocks,” by the inimitable Agatha Christie, secretary Sheila Webb is about to discover a dead body: “Sheila started violently as there was a whir and a click above her head, and from a wooden carved clock on the wall a cuckoo sprang out through a little door and announced loudly and definitely: Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo! The harsh note seemed almost menacing.” The clock sounds a note of foreboding in the novel’s first few pages.

What’s more mysterious is that the room is filled with “a profusion of clocks–a grandfather…a Dresden china clock…a silver carriage clock…a small fancy gilt clock” and “a faded leather travelling clock, with ROSEMARY in worn gilt letters across the corner.” All these clocks are stopped at 4:13, and what’s even MORE baffling is that the home’s owner denies that the clocks, except for the cuckoo clock, are hers. Why are there so many clocks? And why are they all showing the same time? And by the way, who is the dead man in a pool of blood behind the sofa? 

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In this mystery, detective Hercule Poirot tries to find out what is going on from the comfort of his armchair, while other investigators do the actual work of investigating. (To be fair, he takes this relaxed approach as a result of a challenge from another character.)

The cover art on our copy (image 5) takes advantage of the cuckoo clock’s “menacing” call by portraying it with a cuckoo bird in the form of a skull. The illustration references not only the death in the story, but the historical memento mori shapes of watches over time, including skulls. Images 6 and 7, from the book “500 Years, 100 Watches,” show a skull watch made by Jean Rousseau around 1650. Its movement is crammed into the “cranial cavity,” as the text puts it, while opening its toothy grin reveals the dial between its jaws. A 400-year-old watch with a movement for a brain that speaks the time out of its dead metal mouth. It might remind you of the inevitability of death, and it definitely knows when you’re going to die.

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For a more recent mystery read, why not try “Just Killing Time,” by Julianne Holmes, the first in a clock-themed series? How could you resist with this blurb on the back cover: “Ruth Clagan may be an expert clockmaker, but she has always had a tendency to lose track of time. And when trying to solve a murder, every second counts…” 

Ruth returns home after her grandfather’s death. He ran a small-town New England clock shop, the Cog & Sprocket, before being killed in an apparent robbery. Now Ruth must reconstruct what happened to him while settling into her new role as heir to the shop. Luckily, she’s a horologist and clockmaker herself, so she’s “comforted and inspired” by the cluttered shop, with its “clock guts everywhere” and “smell that combined lemon oil, dust, mothballs and motor grease.” And she has a sassy shop cat, Bezel, to aid her investigations.

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If you’re hooked already, we’ve just added two sequels to our library, titled “Clock and Dagger” and “Chime and Punishment.” As you may have guessed from the titles, horological puns are a delightfully heavy component of Holmes’ writing: Ruth is “wound up”; she won’t stop until the killer is “serving time”; she’ll have to kick into “high gear” to solve the case. You can see all three books in the series in image 8; importantly for cat people like me, all of the covers feature a cat amongst the steampunk-esque gears and tools.

Not every crime is a murder, of course. I’ll leave you with the infamous tale of the Queen, the real horological heist that plays a part in the Allen Kurzweil novel “The Grand Complication.” This 2016 Forbes piece about the watch’s story begins “It seems like something out of a Sherlock Holmes novel…” That couldn’t be more accurate.

Celebrated horologist Abraham-Louis Breguet created the watch, called No. 160, for Marie Antoinette in 1783, but it wasn’t finished for 44 years after its initial commission. With 23 complications, made mostly of gold and covered in jewels, it was an extraordinarily expensive watch of extraordinary ingenuity. It passed through the collection of David Salomons before ending up in the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, whence it was stolen by an expert jewel thief in 1983, along with over 100 other rare timepieces.

That’s where the story stood when Kurzweil published “The Grand Complication” in 2001. The Queen, along with dozens of other pieces, was missing, a legendary work of art visible only in images and records. In the novel, a private collector hires Alexander Short, “a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests” to find a missing object that turns out to be…you guessed it. Horology may be the least arcane thing in this novel, which also includes “quirky colleagues, erotic pop-ups, deviant passions, and miraculous examples of theft,” according to the publisher.

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I enjoyed the book’s horological easter eggs, among them a tiny escape wheel illustration that appears between sections of text that is a rendering of one within the movement of the watch in question. As you flip through the book, the wheel turns.

In real life, Swatch group CEO Nicolas G. Hayek commissioned a period-perfect working replica of the famous timepiece in 2005, and right around the time that replica was finished a few years later, the stolen original resurfaced. That complicated story is one told in John Biggs’ nonfiction work “Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny and Perpetual Motion.” This book is the only one in this article to contain crime scene photos (image 9), for the true crime aficionados among you! If you have a favorite horological mystery novel, please let us know so that we can add it to the library collection. 

Time shows up in fiction in a lot of ways–time travel being one of the most common. People often have a desire to alter things that already happened, to see if they could get something right if they could just do it one more time. In real life, as in crime novels, we can’t go back. Time might seem to shrink and stretch when we’re affected by strong emotions, and yet it relentlessly ticks on, no matter whose heart is beating out its final rhythm, no matter whose body lies cold on the floor.

Upcoming Lecture: Krayon: Artistic and Technical Creations

PLEASE NOTE OCTOBER’S LECTURE WILL BEGIN AT 6PM ET.

Rémi Maillat, Founder, Krayon (Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
October 7, 2024

We all depend on the sun rising and setting each day and generally know the times it does so. But determining those times with a mechanical watch is complicated. With a deep understanding of that issue, Rémi Maillat, Founder of Krayon, has invented a mechanical timepiece that can display sunrise and sunset times nearly anywhere in the world.

At the October 2024 lecture of the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), Maillat will offer a deep dive into the brand, unveiling the complexity behind their timepieces. Maillat will explore not only the mathematical and mechanical aspects but also the astronomical implications embedded in what appear to be simple designs. In addition, Maillat will highlight the artistic importance that remains at the heart of all Krayon creations.

*Doors open at 5:30 PM ET, lecture to begin at 6 PM ET. RSVP is required.

** The lecture video will be available to members immediately, and to the general public following a two-month delay.

Upcoming Lecture: The Trials and Tribulations of Resurrecting a Family Watch Company

PLEASE NOTE SEPTEMBER’S LECTURE WILL BEGIN AT 6PM ET.

Nicholas Bowman-Scargill, (4th) Managing Director, Fears Watch Company (Bristol, UK)
September 9, 2024

What does it take to bring an old family watch brand back to life? From the planning, research and trademarking to working out how to actually make the watches, there are many aspects to consider. At the September 2024 lecture of the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), Nicholas Bowman-Scargill, (4th) Managing Director of the Fears Watch Company will discuss how three British watch companies were restarted by a member of the founding family in the past decade: Duckworth Prestex, Fears and Vertex.

*Doors open at 5:30 PM ET, lecture to begin at 6 PM ET. RSVP is required.

** The lecture video will be available to members immediately, and to the general public following a two-month delay.

Reading Time at HSNY: Watch Your Tongue!

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

Wie spaet ist es? Vad är klockan? Horas, minutos y segundos. Do you feel like you stumbled into a Duolingo nightmare without warning? Don’t worry. I began with the phrases above to give you an idea of the quiet babble that takes place every day among the books in our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY). 

Since starting in my role here more than two years ago, I’ve understood the collection to be deeply multilingual. Every day I learn more words that help me find books and assist researchers: Kuckucksuhren, or cuckoo clocks in German. Orologi da polso, or wristwatches in Italian. 

However, I’ve never undertaken a complete survey of the collection before, partly because, for the first part of my time here, we were still deep in the task of cataloging our books. Now that that work is largely done, I can use our new library catalog to find books by language of publication–and I encourage you to do it too! The advanced search function will help you filter the collection by language, as well as other options like subject and date range.

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My survey shows that HSNY boasts books and periodicals in at least 28 languages. I say “at least” because this accounting includes only cataloged materials and might be missing some of our multilingual ephemera–things like museum brochures, postcards, and parts manuals. Many books also include more than one language, including dictionaries for watchmakers that tell you what parts are called in different tongues, like the directly titled “Wie heißt das Teil?” (“What is the name of the part?”), pictured in image 1. Did you know that a mainspring-releasing pinion is called a rocchetto di disimpegno della molla in Italian? You can thank me for that tasty morsel of trivia for use at your next social gathering!

Sometimes one library catalog record leads to many volumes of reading material–like this one for “Brasil relojoeiro e joalheiro,” a monthly magazine on watchmaking and jewelry published in São Paulo. As you can see, we have over 40 years of this publication in our collection! Image 2 shows an advertisement for the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and image 3 is one for the Bulova Accutron, both from 1964 issues. The Fifty Fathoms is the watch preferred by “top athletes on high climbs or at great depths,” while the Accutron is of course “the only electronic watch in the world.” (As a note, please write in if you have corrections to any of these translations, since I’m personally not as much of a polyglot as our collection is!)

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Image 4 is a cover from February 1976, advertising Seiko. Interestingly, the watch indicators in the image show the day as both “Sun” for Sunday, in English, and “Dom” for Domingo, in Portuguese (conveniently spelled the same in Spanish). This points to a multilingual watch market in 1970s Brazil, in which wearers might prefer days in English, Portuguese, or another language. In image 5, a person’s hand, seemingly made out of titanium, advertises a titanium Omega Seamaster model available in 1983. This watch “comes from another world!” There’s some visual overlap between the space-age futurism of the Accutron and Seamaster advertisements. Being associated with outer space is eternally cool when it comes to watches–from the Speedmaster to the MoonSwatch.

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Portuguese literature, from either Brazil or Portugal, is not heavily represented at HSNY, though these aren’t our only Portuguese volumes. Unsurprisingly, among our books, English is the most common language, with about half of the collection made up of English language volumes. After that, it’s German, which also makes sense, given that the donor who built our collection, and who’s responsible for its incredible diversity, is a native German speaker–Fortunat Mueller-Maerki. German makes up about a quarter of the book collection, while French is slightly less, about a fifth. Nothing shocking so far: since much of the watchmaking industry continues to be based in Switzerland, many books by and about watchmakers are written in German and French.

I wish I had the space in this article to highlight books in every language in our collection, including our substantial holdings in Italian and Dutch. I don’t, so I’m just going to choose some that surprised or intrigued me, and you can come into the library for the rest. I was pleased to discover books in our collection in Catalan, Estonian, Indonesian, and Slovene. Our lone Catalan volume, “Els Rellotges Públics de Mallorca” by Josep Lluís Forteza Pomar, discusses public clocks in Mallorca, an island off Spain that uses a Catalan dialect as one of its languages. 

A book written in the local language by a local author, in this case published by a local government council, helps researchers gain a more authentic understanding of the subject. Image 6, for example, shows a public clock in Mallorca that most tourists would probably overlook, since it adorns the façade of a care facility. The smaller inset photos, which include dates and measurements, show inaccessible details of the movement like the escapement and the control dial (with delicate Breguet hands.)

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Several of our items in languages that are less common in the context of our collection help us to understand and visualize museum exhibitions or regional manufacturing histories. An article in Slovene illustrates a display of clocks in Ljubljana, the capital city. Clocks of the Ottoman empire are covered in Turkish. Books in Russian cover horological treasures of the Kremlin, while books in Japanese focus on both 20th-century military watches and Edo-period wadokei (two of which we currently have on display at HSNY). The gorgeous flower pot clock in image 7 comes from a book whose title translates to “Timepieces Collected by Qing Emperors in the Palace Museum.” According to the caption, it was made in about 1780 by Timothy Williamson in the UK, and includes multiple moving automata, including trembling petals.

A book in Romanian, by Volker Wollmann, covers “Pre-industrial and Industrial Heritage in Romania” and is our only volume about that country. Wollmann includes not only public clocks, but also lighthouses, fountains, wells, and other forms of public architecture. 

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One of my favorite photos in the book shows a detail of seven allegorical figures from the famous 17th-century Sighișoara Clock Tower (image 8). Each figure represents not only a day of the week, but also an ancient god and a specific metal noted by an alchemical symbol. For instance, the first figure at top left, Monday, represents Artemis, with the moon symbol also denoting the metal silver.

Other books, of course, are simple translations or not topically related to the country in which the language is spoken, like a book about Junghans in Estonian, an elementary watchmaking textbook in Indonesian, or a book about chamber clocks in Croatian. It’s important to have these books in our library too–not every Danish speaker only wants to know about watchmaking in Denmark. Sometimes, if you’re an aspiring urmager, you just need to sit down with a thorough håndbog and get to work!

One result of my survey has been a new determination to expand our multilingual holdings. Our assistant librarian, St John Karp, an Esperanto enthusiast, has just acquired our first two books in that language. “La 13 Horloĝoj” (“The 13 Clocks”) is a translation of a strange fairy tale originally written by James Thurber, also in our library in English. “La Kalendaro tra la Tempo, tra la Spaco” (“The Calendar through Time, through Space”) was written in Esperanto by André Cherpillod. So, Esperantists unite! You will now be able to enjoy our library in your preferred tongue.

While English continues to be the most-used language for our patrons, we want to make sure we truly have something for everyone, and that means books and periodicals in many tongues. Curious about kellosepät? Doing a deep dive into dawne zegary? We hope you’ll use our resources, and leave our library with an enhanced appreciation of horology’s global reach and cross-cultural capacity.

HSNY Establishes a Partnership With the Horopedia Foundation

Partnering with the first online video encyclopedia on watchmaking

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY), America’s first watchmaking guild, founded in 1866, announces today a partnership with the Horopedia Foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland. Horopedia Foundation becomes HSNY’s fifth nonprofit ally since the start of the Society’s partnership program in 2021. 

Carolina Navarro, HSNY’s Deputy Director, meets with horologist and philanthropist Philippe Dufour during Geneva Watch Days 2024. Dufour serves as President of the Horopedia Foundation.

Horopedia Foundation governs Horopedia.org, the first online video encyclopedia on watchmaking. The platform was launched in 2022 and quickly gathered unanimous support within the community, standing out as a comprehensive source of intelligence for the entire horological ecosystem and showcasing an innovative approach to preserving and sharing watchmaking expertise. The Foundation Council is composed of Philippe Dufour (President), Dr. Helmut Crott, André Colard, and Marc André Deschoux.

Horopedia.org meticulously covers all facets of the horological industry in French, English, and German, and offers detailed definitions of tools and complications, 3D images of movements, and thorough video explanations of component production, their history, and functions in a watch. To date, the website features nearly 900 pages with detailed definitions of watchmaking terms and historical anecdotes about significant horological inventions.

“We are thrilled to draw some bridges with like-minded people defending and educating all the crafts behind the watchmaking,” said Marc André Deschoux, Founder of the Horopedia Foundation. “Together, we can enhance the reach and impact of our efforts to document and celebrate the rich history of timekeeping. We are eager to embark on this journey with HSNY and to see the profound influence our combined efforts will have on the global horological community.”

Learn more about the Horological Society of New York here.
Learn more about the Horopedia Foundation here.

HSNY Traveling Education Announcement, July/August 2024

Discover what makes a watch tick with a hands-on course taught by the Horological Society of New York's staff of professional watchmakers. Students work on a mechanical watch movement, studying the movement mechanics, gear train, and winding and setting works. No previous experience is required for this four-hour course. Learn more at https://hs-ny.org/nyc-education.