The Horologist’s Loupe

The Horological Society of New York's newsletter (and today blog!) began publishing in 1936, and is one of the oldest continuously running horological publications in the world.

Horological Society of New York 5/30/25 Horological Society of New York 5/30/25

Reading Time at HSNY: The Bound and the Beautiful

*A selection of marbled book cases at HSNY. These are actually custom boxes that protect rare books, not the books themselves.*

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by Head Librarian Miranda Marraccini.

When visitors come to our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), we encourage them to pull books off the shelf that catch their eye. Sometimes, what draws people in is obvious: a big-name watch brand in the title, the sparkle of a diamond-set bezel on the cover, a book that looks ancient. Other times it’s something quirkier. One of the best-thumbed books in our collection is the straightforwardly named “Problems in Time and Space.”

Why, you might ask, would visitors pick out this dry-sounding textbook from 1909? It’s because the book has a Star of David on the binding, so many people assume it must be about connections between Judaism and horology–a subject that we do indeed have a few books about (for instance, “Understanding the Jewish Calendar” and “The Watchmakers.”)

But “Problems in Time and Space” uses the Star of David only as a hexagram, a simple astronomical symbol, just like a five-pointed star. It doesn’t actually discuss Judaism at all. Images 1 and 2 show the spine and cover of the book, apparently a magnet for bookshelf browsers.

The book covers topics including astronomical measurement, the magnetism of the Earth, and the historical development of the calendar. Images 3 and 4 are two illustrations from the book, one showing the path of Earth’s axis as it is affected by precession and nutation, and one demonstrating the hours of daylight and dark at the solstices and equinoxes.

Based on my own experience browsing our shelves, something about astronomy seems to inspire a beautiful book–the tapestry swirl of a distant galaxy against the cold blue-black of the void. One of our most understated little books, “The Orbs of Heaven” (1865), nonetheless makes an attempt to represent the vast, terrifying beauty of the universe in very little space.

It caught my eye on the shelf because of the binding (image 5), a gold-stamped cloth emblazoned with images of Saturn and other stars and planets, along with a telescope and the names of important astronomers throughout history: Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Herschel.

My favorite illustrations are the six nebulae at the end, rendered in an exquisite deep blue that seems to have faded very little with time; in image 6, “the whirlpool or spiral nebula as seen through Lord Rosse’s Telescope.” In an era before easy photographic reproduction, the illustrators used engraving to produce an evocative image, with fine lines and speckles of white against the saturated background conveying the swirling pinpricks of distant suns.

Based on a number of pencil inscriptions scrawled in its first few pages, I think this copy might have belonged to American astronomer John Adelbert Parkhurst, who was prominent enough to get a crater named after him on the moon! So the book in our library isn’t the only memorial to the honorable Professor Parkhurst, an expert in photometry. The surface of the moon remembers him too.

Aside from astronomy, another topic that seems to inspire beautiful bindings is sundials. During the early 20th century, sundials emerged as an acceptable horological topic for female writers to pursue–sundials were decorative; they belonged in the garden, which was often considered a wife’s domain; and they had historical associations with literature and art, fields in which women were more represented than in the sciences.

Alice Morse Earle of Brooklyn was one such woman, and her “Sun-dials and Roses of Yesterday” (1902) is one such beautiful book in our library (image 7). As the title suggests, it covers both sundials and roses. But in her foreword, Earle makes her fascination with book design very clear, spending two out of four pages describing in detail her minute decisions about the type, decoration, and binding of the book.

Earle has copied the decorative initials (larger, elaborately designed letters at the beginning of each section) from “ancient volumes, many of them being appropriately old herbals and books on husbandry.” She even supplies specific references for her typography choices: “A fine example of an heraldic capital is the old black-letter H shown on page 233, from a book printed in Paris in 1514.” In image 8, you can see just how hard these initial letters can be to read–proving that style and substance, though both important, are not always aligned in book design.

Earle, a historian of Colonial American life, dedicated the book to her adult daughter Mary “to commemorate her first summer with her own garden and sundial” after her marriage (image 9). She wrote in her inscription: “May the motto of her dial be that of her life[:] I mark only sunny hours.” For Earle, this book celebrated a connection between generations at a moment full of hope and optimism, like the first roses of the summer coming into bloom.

What Earle’s book lacks, however, is color. “A Book of Sundials,” published in this edition in 1922, fixes that with a color cover (image 10) and eight tipped-in color illustrations. Most of the book focuses on sundial mottos, brief phrases usually in Latin or English, that express some pithy sentiment about time passing. These can be as simple as “Carpe Diem,” as annoying as “I note the time that you waste,” or as hardcore as “Mors de die accelerat” (“Every day brings death nearer.”) These memento mori motifs make a funny textual juxtaposition with the volume’s vivid, bucolic illustrations of sundials in perpetually sunny gardens (image 11).

So far we’ve looked at gorgeous stars and gorgeous flowers, books of the sky and books of the earth. But not everything in our library that looks good covers a lofty subject. I want to assure you that practical books can also be pretty, if someone cares enough. Take “Know the Escapement,” published in the 1940s by married couple Sarah and Homer Barkus, and one of our original library books at HSNY. In addition to its many photographs and line drawings illustrating escapements and how they work, “Know the Escapement” is also tactile.

The front cover design (image 12) features a 3D embossed lever escapement on a swirly background. I wish you could feel the texture of the coated fabric that makes up the cover. It feels almost waterproof, as if you tossed it into the ocean in a moment of frustration during a particularly fraught escapement repair, it would emerge unscathed. However, please do not toss any of our library books into the ocean or any body of water.

The Barkuses were both watchmakers. According to the book’s introduction, Homer taught his wife the trade, and Sarah took to it like a horological duck to water: over the years, “a good-natured rivalry has developed between them; some customers prefer one, and some the other, to repair their watches.” The authors seem to have understood the importance of physical experience in watchmaking, since their Barkus Horological Laboratories also produced large-scale escapement models for classroom use.

Yes, even the most humble parts catalog can be beautiful, as in the case of the Elgin National Watch Company net price list from 1915 (see image 13.) Our copy is not in great condition, but its worn cover still boasts a winged Father Time holding a pocket watch and scythe, an early Elgin logo that has been characterized as “borderline creepy.”

It’s certainly eye-catching, with an Art Nouveau flourish accented in bright gold. As a material object, the catalog is a testament to the way that turn-of-the-century watch companies in America joined innovations in manufacturing with populist marketing practices. They built relatively precise watches at scale, and successfully democratized watch ownership. Just like the watches Elgin produced in 1915, this catalog is mass-produced, cheap, functional, and attractive.

If this article encourages you to judge a book by its cover, I celebrate your aesthetic preferences. You might choose something based on whimsy, and come out of the experience with a depth of knowledge you weren’t seeking or expecting. That’s what happened to me. That’s the library’s strange power, leading you forward through obscure passages toward an unknown fate. As one sundial motto has it, Ecce hora! Or, as the “Book of Sundials” translates: behold, the hour of destiny!

Horological Society of New York 4/28/25 Horological Society of New York 4/28/25

Reading Time at HSNY: Adventures in Advertising

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by library intern Freddy Thompson.

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) has a wonderful library full of books on everything from escapements to celestial navigation to the Loch Ness monster (yes, really), but did you also know we have significant archival holdings, too? While books (and a few of our more bookish blooks) can be neatly cataloged and arranged on the shelf by their Library of Congress call numbers, archival items can be a lot trickier. These items can range from exhibition flyers to diaries to T-shirts and jigsaw puzzles (all real examples in HSNY's holdings), so they need to be broken up into categories and described in finding aids. One of the biggest collections we have within the archives is our brand catalogs, and it's been my job these past few months to organise and describe them. I have a fondness for archival arranging, no matter how dull the materials, but this particular collection has taught me more about the history of watch and clock advertising than I thought there was to learn, so I thought I'd share some highlights with you.

What is a Brand Catalog, Anyway?

In short? It’s a big ad.

*Bulova’s Spring 1980 catalog and (one of) Swatch’s 2010 catalogs. Much like comparing a Great Pyrenees and a Chihuahua, you’ll have to take my word for it when I say these are the same species.*

Brands release these periodically — often once a year, sometimes once a month, or (for brands going for a fashion angle) seasonally — to show off their current products. Sometimes they have prices — whether printed directly into the catalog or in an attached supplement — but sometimes they don’t. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it (and it might be sold for different prices in different markets).

Physically, they tend to exist somewhere on the continuum between “booklet” and “magazine”, though some of the bigger ones look just like a book, and some of the smaller ones are flimsy enough to approach the pamphlet label. What separates them from a leaflet or a brochure or another form of advertising is usually just their size and extent — we definitely have a few gray areas, but I tend to make the call that a brand catalog must be showing off more than one model of watch in order to count. And what separates them from the big showcase volumes of brand watches we have is their manner of publication: our main library room has books with ISBNs that were printed to be sold, whereas the brand catalogs in the archives were printed as advertising material without ISBNs (and sometimes, annoyingly, any identifying information at all).

But as for what’s actually in them: that varies a great deal, and the way that it varies can reveal quite a lot about not just watches and clocks, but the way advertising — and the society it targets — has evolved over the years.

In the Beginning…

Things were pretty simple.

*Jerome and Jerome, with a pencil for scale.*

Catalogs as a medium came into being around the middle of the 18th century, right as this whole “mass production” thing was starting to kick into gear, but they weren’t super common until the 19th century, where HSNY’s holdings begin. Our oldest catalogs are both from 1852 — one from Jerome & Co. Manufacturers and Wholesale Clock Dealers, Philadelphia, and the other from Chauncey Jerome, Manufacturer of Brass Clocks, New Haven, Connecticut. (Yes, it’s the same Jerome, and his disparate businesses and attributions went on to become the New Haven Clock Co.)

*These clocks are Papier Maiche. Do you like that? Does it make you want to buy them? Does it mean anything to you at all? Jerome doesn’t particularly care. He just makes them.*

The clocks in this 1874 E. Howard & Co. catalog aren’t just made of black walnut, it’s well-seasoned black walnut, and they’re even well adapted for use in dwelling-houses. No word on other houses though.

These tiny pamphlets were fragile and ephemeral, intended to last for the year and then be discarded. Our editions are 20th-century facsimiles, made to look and feel like the originals, which are now out of print, as is the case for most of our catalogs from before World War II. The illustrations are simple, clear, and head-on — there’s no stage-lighting, there’s no color (in either the images or the copy) — you’re told the basic facts of the clocks. Whether you want to buy one or not is up to you.

As the century progressed, however, catalog copywriters began to realise that they could put some spin on the facts they were stating in order to make these clocks and watches more appealing to potential buyers.

With the limitations on photographic technology, brand catalogs from this era were restricted to detailed illustrations, and — through this limitation — were restricted in turn to purely representational depictions of the products. Techniques like dramatic angles and mood lighting, which appeared later, weren’t yet a good idea. Without photos, customers had to take the seller’s word that their illustration accurately depicted their product. Too much stylization and you risked someone arguing that they didn't get what they paid for.

Photos

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, photography became possible thanks to inventions like the halftone process, flashbulbs, and the wirephoto. The spread of photography in advertising was not a uniform process — it varied greatly depending on location, culture, and even on the target audience of the ads. For much of its early history, photography was seen as a kind of vulgar tool, and high-end brands (as well as newspapers and magazines) would position themselves as elegant and cultured by making sure all their images were engravings that only referenced photos.

Even when showing off technical information like the workings of this two train chime mechanism, it was seen as uncouth to use a photograph instead of an engraving. Picture from The Herschede Hall Clock Company’s 1923-1924 Hall Clocks catalog.

It didn’t take too long for photography to catch on, though. Even before the post-World War II consumerism boom, American brand catalogs were branching out into photos that did more than just show you what a clock looked like: they were realizing they could show you what a clock meant.

*This desk clock is staged with a cigar, so you know it’s good for you.*

While engravings aspired to exacting representation without the vulgarity of just being what the thing actually looked like, photographs could capture the surroundings of the product, too. The 1939 Seth Thomas catalog takes advantage of this to stage little settings for many of its featured clocks. Clocks shaped like ship wheels are placed next to model ships to capture the attention of their maritime audience, while ornate, traditional mantel clocks are positioned between fine silver jugs atop a fireplace to attract fancy people who like fancy things.

It’s not until the 1950s and 1960s, however, that things really kicked off.

The Postwar Boom

At the risk of sounding like the first few minutes of Mad Men, the 50s and 60s were a golden age for advertising, and not just in the emerging realm of television. New technologies were changing print media, too — color printing was becoming cheap enough to be viable for advertising material, and with audiences now thoroughly used to interpreting visual media, photos and illustrations were becoming more stylistic and depicting not just the products they were aiming to sell, but the audience they were aiming to sell to.

This spread from the July 1961 Ingraham catalog not only shows off its products in glossy colour, but also invites “homemakers, career girls, coeds, teen-agers” to imagine themselves as the smiling, stylish women drawn alongside them.

By this point in time, there was big money in advertising, and watch and clock brands were willing to pay up to stand out, but catalogs were still ephemeral pieces of advertising. And color printing may have gotten cheaper, but it was still expensive, so when something went wrong in the printing process companies might not have been willing to completely overhaul the run. This was even true in the case of a minor printing error like the one found in the Alpha Watch Co., Inc.’s 1962 catalog where the colors look slightly offset with the result that the image becomes soft and blurry. But that imperfection allows us to see how these early color photos were printed, revealing how each color print was actually multiple prints — each of a single color — printed over each other.

*In an age when the average American was reading color magazines and could even have color TV, it was better for brand catalogs to have imperfect color than risk having no colour at all.*

Even with the pared-down copy in the Alpha Watch Co., Inc. catalog, advertising language is still doing heavy lifting — everything is “acclaimed”, “super” and “guaranteed”, but with improvements in print and photography technology, it wasn’t long before the most effective indication of quality became saying nothing at all.

Quiet Luxury

Depending on the intended audience of the brand, advertising in the 70s could go in many directions. More domestic-oriented brands like Seth Thomas took advantage of improvements in color print and photography to stage scenes of comfort and familiarity, while still extolling their virtues in descriptive and friendly copy. Meanwhile, luxury brands like Bulova — who had always been at the cutting edge of advertising — started to realize that less was more.

*Seth Thomas’ 1973 catalog. BYO beer and whittled duck.*

*Bulova’s April 1977 catalog refuses to ask, let alone answer, any questions about its own products, demanding that the reader seek them out if they want to know more.*

Bulova’s April 1977 catalog includes some copy, but it also includes whole pages of watches identified solely by their model number, against a featureless blue background. The layout demands that the watches speak for themselves, and in a market since saturated with fawning copy, it suggests that the watches have plenty to say on their own. This lack of information places the watches in a privileged position — they know something you don’t. Maybe if you bought one of these watches, you would know something other people don’t.

*IWC’s 1974 catalog does more than just objectify women, it also displays an early example of the “luxury gradient” that would characterise luxury watch photography of the eighties and nineties.*

IWC’s 1974 catalog stands at an interesting crossroads. As a luxury brand, it was well and truly positioning its products as something to aspire to. While using human models — whether drawn or photographed — would soon become as gauche as an un-engraved photograph in the 1900s, IWC had beautiful women model some of its featured pieces in this catalog. All of the models specifically avoid eye contact with the viewer. They’re positioned as unobtainable, desirable things — and they’re wearing IWC watches. Maybe if you bought an IWC watch, the women would no longer be unobtainable. There is copy (in German), but it is pared down, back to the bare basics that we saw in early trade catalogs. Yes, the watch is made of 18 karat gold, but it’s up to you to know how good that is.

This trend continued through the end of the 20th century. Brand catalogs became more image-focused, with the photos becoming larger, higher quality, and with a focus on details of the pieces against simple backgrounds. Often these backgrounds were a kind of mood-lit gradient, evoking a kind of evening-wear elegance even for stationary household pieces.

*This L’Epée catalog from the mid-nineties (exact date unknown) puts its carriage clocks on a plain black plinth in a mood-lit void.*

Turn of the Millennium

All this simplicity and implication is all well and good for the second millennium, but it’s the information age now, and everyone wants to know everything about everything. It’s hard to say when exactly the switch flipped, but technical information is now back in vogue.

*It’d be weird to drown this page from Swatch’s 2015 catalog in copy when the watches don’t even have numbered dials, right?*

Chopard’s Grand Prix de Monaco Historique 2008 catalog is a celebration of Chopard’s relationship with the Monaco Grand Prix, and its product listings read like the technical specs of a top of the line race car.

Some brands stuck to their stripped-down guns — brands like Swatch present themselves as modern, slick and fashionable, and their 21st-century catalogs still reflect that.

It might be too soon to say — our brand catalogs do only go up until 2019 — but the combined influences of everything from the prominence of sports watches to the profligacy of data about everything in the 21st century suggests that we might be seeing spec-riddled catalogs for a good while to come.

Horological Society of New York 4/1/25 Horological Society of New York 4/1/25

Reading Time at HSNY: When is a Book Not a Book?

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

At the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), I’m one of the librarians with an affinity for cataloging. You might think that’s as straightforward as writing down the title of the book and the name of the author, but you’d be forgetting one thing: clocks and watches are weird. We deal with a lot of unusual items that most other libraries don’t have to worry about. Your local public library, for example, has to keep well stocked on the latest popular fiction. The world of horology, on the other hand, produces so many strange things that it’s not always clear what the title of a book is. Sometimes it’s not even clear whether or not the thing is a book at all. So let’s have a gander at some of the weird and wonderful things that clock- and watchmakers have launched into the world. Then we might find an answer to the question: when is a book not a book?

When It’s a Catalog

*Richard Mille’s “Endless Summer” catalog featuring an accordion booklet and three jigsaw puzzles*

A lot of kinda-sorta-maybe books are watch catalogs. If their status as a book is in doubt, then their status as a catalog is unambiguous at least. It’s just that the catalog might come in any shape or form you can imagine because watch brands like to project a certain image and make their offerings stand out. I haven’t seen a catalog distributed in the form of a pogo stick or a mind-altering mist, but it’s only a matter of time. “Prices: A Million Times, 2023” is a catalog of 17 cards in a box from Humans since 1982, the Swedish design team that produced the fabulous ClockClock 24 kinetic time-telling sculpture that hangs on the wall of HSNY’s Jost Bürgi Research Library. Each card in the set depicts a different clock produced by Humans since 1982 with accompanying information. The title, not written on the box, had to come from a price list at the back of the deck.

Taking it one step further (or one step weirder) is a catalog from Richard Mille, “Endless Summer,” which contains a folded accordion-style brochure of Richard Mille’s watches with accompanying poetry. Oh, yeah, and three jigsaw puzzles. Yes, jigsaw puzzles. I haven’t had the courage to try and jumble up the pieces and put them back together, partly because I’m not cool enough to do a Richard Mille puzzle, and partly because these catalogs are so collectible that they sell for about $350 on eBay. I make very sure to wipe the chocolate off my fingers before handling this catalog.

*A symphony in brown: the “Montres de Poche” catalog from Longines*

Another entry in the “let’s put a bunch of cards in a box” category is “Montres de Poche,” a catalog from Longines. A luxurious faux-leather sleeve looks like a book and opens like a book, but inside are 55 high-gloss photographs of luxury pocket watches so dripping with class that I feel like I ought to have a knighthood just to gaze upon their resplendent majesty. It also contains a brochure, though this one isn’t folded like an accordion or split into a jigsaw puzzle. It does, however, come drenched in the browns and oranges of the 1970s and, whenever I gaze upon it, I feel myself transported to a room with shag carpets and a popcorn ceiling.

When It’s for Kids

*Children’s books are often more than they seem*

We also have an extensive collection of juvenile literature, another source of mysterious objects that might be books — or might be something else. “Golden Clock Book” is one of many books we have that teach kids how to tell the time. However, in addition to the book part, this one also has a whopping massive clock sticking out the top with movable hands. It is, in fact, so tall that it doesn’t fit on any of our shelves. When summer comes I’m going to climb on board this thing and go surfing.

“Talking Kiddie Book with Playtime Clock” is doing triple duty — as a picture book, a toy clock, and a squeeze toy that makes a raspy squeaking sound reminiscent of the one my neighbor’s pug makes. “The Time Book” seems like an obvious candidate for just classifying as a book, but it does have a whole wristwatch attached to the cover, so yes, it’s a book, but it’s also a constant reminder of the ubiquity of quartz timekeepers. The colorful dinosaur looks like it’s learning how to read the time, but to me, it is as a herald of doom, an ill-omened Harpy, the specter of Death tapping me on the shoulder and whispering in my ear, “Remember, one day you’ll die.”

When It’s Two Books

It’s always confusing to find out that a book is secretly something else too, but it’s possibly even more confusing when a book is actually two or more books. This isn’t uncommon in a couple of cases. In the days of old when knights were bold and toilets weren’t invented, books were sold without being bound. You bought a sheaf of loose papers that you took to a bindery to have bound between covers, like buying a pair of unhemmed trousers and having a tailor hem them for you. Often, book collectors would have two or more publications bound together in one binding, particularly if they were on a related subject. We book people call this a “Sammelband,” which is German for “What have you done to my book?”

The other scenario where this happens a lot has to do with our librarian emeritus and donor, Fortunat Mueller-Maerki, who was very enterprising when it came to having small or loose items bound together in custom bindings. These bindings were often colorful and decorative, lending a splash of color to our library, although it does present me with the occasional mystery when I pick up a book and have to figure out what it is.

Typically we won’t have more than two books bound together in the same volume, but I have worked with rare books that contained three, four, or even five books bound into a single Frankenbook.

When It’s a Clock

We’ve already seen a book that has a whole wristwatch strapped to the cover and several that contain toy clocks with movable hands, but what if the book doesn’t just contain a clock — what if the book is a clock? I mean, technically, any book could be a clock if you just stood it up and used it as the gnomon of an impromptu sundial, but don’t sass me, I’m trying to make a point here. “Make Your Own Working Paper Clock” is a book that you attack with a pair of scissors, cut into 160 pieces, and assemble to form a fully functional weight-driven clock. The cover states repeatedly that “it actually works,” suggesting that the authors have already had to fend off some doubting Thomases. “The Working Clock/Timer” is another iteration on the concept, this time with “only 47 parts.” It also promises very earnestly that it “actually works” (emphasis and astonishment in the original).

In a similar vein are “Die Digital-Sonnenuhr,” “Die Ring-Sonnenuhr,” and “Die Sternenuhr,” three kits that you can use to build your own sundial. “You fiend!” I hear you cry in outrage. “You said it had to be kinda-sorta a book, you can’t go cheating by throwing a kit into the mix.” Ah, but wait — these kits were issued by the publisher with International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). I’m counting them.

I really didn’t think I’d find anything too hilarious when I went looking for kit books. Strange, yes; quirky, yes; but hilarious, no. Then I happened upon “Miniature Wooden Clocks for the Scroll Saw,” which contains templates you can use to cut decorative patterns for your homemade clock. Categories of patterns include animals, vehicles, and sports, in case you want to depict some hardcore golf and skiing action on your miniature decorative clock, because nothing says “action sports” like a woodworking project.

*Golfing and skiing scroll saw templates for a wooden clock*

And Beyond!

The Center for Book Arts is a non-profit that promotes the study of the book as an art form. It recently hosted an exhibition called “The Best Kept Secret: 200 Years of Blooks.” You read that right: blooks, “a contraction of ‘book-look.’” The exhibition featured about 70 objects that look like books but aren’t, such as a flask, a lantern, a vanity set, a lighter, and a spy kit. Clearly the fascination with book-like things goes beyond HSNY. It’s interesting that so many people have tested the boundaries of something that should be clearly defined. Everyone knows what a book is, right? But there are so many things that are just on the line, or that maybe fall slightly on one side or the other. Once you start poking around at what counts as a book and what doesn’t, you wind up being less sure than when you started. What is a book? What’s a clock? Do I even exist? I’ve got lost down an existential rabbit hole. Maybe a scroll saw woodworking project will calm me down. I know just the blook.

Horological Society of New York 2/28/25 Horological Society of New York 2/28/25

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.

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.

Horological Society of New York 1/29/25 Horological Society of New York 1/29/25

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.

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.

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.

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.

Horological Society of New York 12/31/24 Horological Society of New York 12/31/24

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

Horological Society of New York 11/25/24 Horological Society of New York 11/25/24

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Horological Society of New York 10/28/24 Horological Society of New York 10/28/24

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

Horological Society of New York 10/1/24 Horological Society of New York 10/1/24

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Horological Society of New York 9/3/24 Horological Society of New York 9/3/24

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.

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!)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Horological Society of New York 7/8/24 Horological Society of New York 7/8/24

Reading Time at HSNY: Split Seconds and Photo Finishes at the Olympics

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

Will you be watching the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games starting in Paris next month? I’ve always been an Olympics superfan, though I’m not sure why. Something about the international display of camaraderie, or perhaps the way the games inspire rabid excitement about sports most people don’t pay any attention to in the intervening two years–curling, trampolining, handball, and more. I’ve often found myself standing up in front of the screen at home, fists clenched, screaming as if my life depended on the outcome of a canoe slalom race.

I’m getting to the horology part. The outcome of many sports competitions depends on timing. How do we know who was the fastest, especially in cases where not everyone is competing at the same time, or when the outcome is very, very close? In ancient Greece, where the Olympics originated, timing was imprecise, at best, and relied on sundials and water clocks, as well as the movements of the stars. Thus, most ancient Olympic races, whether in a chariot or on foot, were simply decided by carefully watching the finish line.

With the initiation of the modern Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, so began the implementation of precise timekeeping at the Olympics. Technicians used stopwatches to time events, notably the Heuer Mikrograph, invented in 1916. As this “Europa Star” article reports, watch companies understood early in the 20th century that being associated with the Olympics brought prestige, and a reputation for precision, to the brand. They began to use Olympic sports in their marketing campaigns.

Sometimes, even with close observance and stopwatches, it was impossible to tell who crossed the finish line first. So Olympic timekeepers incorporated cameras capable of making that determination where the human eye failed–after they developed the film, of course. In 1932, the “photo finish” was born.

According to a “Popular Science” article from 1933, the system consisted of three parts: a starting pistol, a motion picture camera recording 128 frames per second, and an electric tuning fork clock. The camera recorded contestants finishing and, simultaneously, the elapsed time on the clock to the hundredth of a second. In image 1, you can see an example of a photo finish output in 1932; in image 2, a 1980s version that uses a quartz clock. The finish time is recorded when the runner’s torso crosses the line. Both of these images are from a book called “Coliseum ‘32-’84,” discussed below.

For the next several months, in our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), we’ll be hosting a triumph of Olympic timing, the Seiko “Olympic Timer” stopwatch. As the name implies, Seiko developed this watch for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. From the moment Japan was chosen to host the Games, Seiko was campaigning for the role of official timer, which necessitated some innovation from the company.

Seiko used a heart-shaped cam for the start and stop mechanism in its new “Olympic Timer,” which reduced mechanical errors and improved precision so that the deviation would not exceed a tenth of a second after hours of repeated use. Ultimately, Seiko succeeded in their attempt to time the Tokyo Olympics, providing 1,278 timing instruments and 172 staff members to support the Games, enhancing the company’s international reputation.

Building on the aura of the Games, Seiko continued using the model name “Olympic Timer” for stopwatches manufactured after the Olympics, including the two currently on display at HSNY, made in 1965 and 1967. Image 3, the 1965 monopusher, indicates time to the tenth of a second on the main dial and times 15-minute intervals on the sub-dial. The 1967 model (images 4 and 5) adds a second pusher to separate start/stop and reset functions. Both are part of a new exhibit, “The Evolution of Seiko and Grand Seiko,” now on display until December 2024.

While Seiko has timed several Olympic Games, most recently in 2002 in Salt Lake City, it has mostly been Swiss companies including Longines and Heuer (now TAG Heuer) who have filled the role. Omega has been the brand most closely associated with Olympic timing since it provided 30 pocket watch chronographs for the 1932 Los Angeles Games; Omega will be timing the Games in Paris next month, its 31st time in the role of Official Timekeeper. Its photo finish camera can record 10,000 images per second at the finish line–no darkroom required!

A related Olympic curiosity in our collection is a book called “Coliseum ‘32-’84: Ars et Scientia temporis mensurae” (the Latin, included presumably for fanciness, translates to “the art and science of time measurement”). The Coliseum in question is the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which hosted the Olympic Games in 1932 and 1984. And with the return of the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028, it will be the first stadium to host the Olympics three times.

I call it a curiosity because the book, printed in three columns in French, English, and German, is full of interesting, grandiose passages like: “Sports and timing, especially in Olympics, are natural partners, since both were born on the slopes of Mount Olympus–thus the world’s elite of Olympic and international sports are judged in the most impartial manner possible: by Cronus–the God of Time himself.” The book tries to evoke the imagined classical splendor of the ancient Olympics, while illustrating modern advances in precision timing in detail.

Image 6 shows a spread from the book depicting the Lemania 1130, a 24-ligne movement used in the Omega chronographs that timed the 1932 Olympics. The book also covers other equipment like starting pistols and blocks, which are part of a false-start prevention system that can disqualify an athlete who begins before the gun fires (or in modern races, before the electronic signal).

Image 7 gives a sense of the range of timing devices and personnel deployed at the 1984 Games. In the smaller images, you can spot video cameras, still cameras, computers, and technicians. The text explains that the timing devices comprised 12 tons of material and were valued at 2.3 million francs.

If you’re looking at the equipment and thinking it looks antiquated, you’re right. Even since 1984, we’ve come a long way. In 2012 the Omega “Quantum Timer” made timekeeping precise to the millionth of a second! In researching this article, I found there was a lot more about Olympic timing still to learn, so I’ve added two books to the collection that I hope you’ll ask for if you visit the library: an Omega book titled “Great Olympic Moments in Time” and a humorous memoir called “Splitting the Second: My Wacky Business in Olympic and Sports Timing,” by Alex Cheng.

So when you’re watching Katie Ledecky hit the wall at the end of the 800 meter freestyle, wondering how on earth anyone can tell if she won the gold medal, think about the generations of timing improvements that have made it possible to really know (the touchpad used in the swimming pool was first deployed in the 1968 Games). It could all come down to a hundredth of a second or less. That’s what makes the challenge and the exhilaration of sports timing–a half breath, an outstretched arm, a final push into the history of human effort.

Horological Society of New York 5/28/24 Horological Society of New York 5/28/24

Reading Time at HSNY: Bedini’s Books

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

Sometimes a mark in a book makes you feel as if you know someone. In this case, it’s an image on a bookplate of a cramped space filled with books, some splayed out, some haphazardly piled (image 1). Barely discernible behind the wings of one giant volume are the hands and cap of a man, reading. He’s hunched over in concentration or absorption (his expression isn’t visible). The Latin motto around the square image reads “Satis Temporis Non Est Nobis” or “For us, there is not enough time.”

Besides the most obvious meaning of this phrase, a kind of memento mori about the brevity of life, there’s also a separate subtext for bibliophiles like us: there’s never enough time to read the books we want, and never enough books about time. I know as a reader I heavily identify with the first part of that subtext and as a librarian at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), the second. This bookplate, and the book it adorns, belonged to the late Silvio Bedini (1917-2007).

A colorful American historian and longtime scholar at the Smithsonian Institution, Bedini was a bibliophile and horologist of the first order. He helped create the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian, a repository of rare books and manuscripts on astronomy, chemistry, and more. At HSNY, we recently acquired a selection of books from Bedini’s personal library, which had been sold to Second Story Books in Washington, D.C.

Bedini wrote many books about timekeeping, which we have in our library at HSNY, but he had diverse research interests, including dominoes, elephants, and incense, wrote The Washington Post in an obituary after he died in 2007 (see image 2, a collection of books by Bedini). He wrote the first biography of noted Black scholar and horologist Benjamin Banneker. Bedini was, by all reports, a “walking encyclopedia”: his son Peter called him a collector of “tidbits” like “how the Coca-Cola bottle got its shape, what is the most poisonous snake, how to write and break codes.” (This last “tidbit” came in handy when Bedini reportedly worked to develop methods for Allied POWs to send secret messages during World War II.)

I would love to highlight all 16 magnificent Bedini books we acquired, now settling into their cozy home at HSNY! But alas, I have only so many column inches, so I’ll include just enough to tempt you to the library to see these treasures. I’ll start with the oldest, then the rarest.

If you’ve been to our library, you’ve probably heard my spiel about the rare books section and our oldest book, a Latin chronology published in 1652 by Jesuit theologian Denis Pétau. Well, Pétau has been dethroned! Our new champion, clocking in at a devastatingly ancient 451 years old, is “Trattato Dell’Uso Della Sfera” by Ignazio Danti. Ding ding ding, the belt is yours, Danti!

Now, age isn’t everything when it comes to rare books (see my next item for an example) but even if it hadn’t been printed back in 1573, this book is cool (image 3 shows the title page). It’s the first book published in Italy about the astrolabe. An astrolabe is a multifunctional star chart, either flat or spherical, that can make complicated navigational and horological calculations. In the Early Modern period, astronomical clocks based on the astrolabe included moving models of the positions of planets and stars. (If you want to learn more about how to operate an astrolabe, I found this explanation from the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford relatively accessible.)

But this book isn’t just about the astrolabe itself; it also covers other astronomical and astrological topics, including the signs of the zodiac. Image 4 shows what looks to me like a Universal Equinoctial Ring Dial–a mouthful of a name, but simply a type of sundial used to determine time at sea at a given latitude. However, a number of these navigational devices look similar, including a mariner’s astrolabe and a nocturnal, and although I’m sure Bedini could tell me more, the text is not very clear about the divisions. The device includes a familiar division of time into 24 segments on the outer rim of a thick plate.

Ignazio Danti (not to be confused with his more famous Florentine counterpart, the divine Dante Alighieri) was somewhat like Silvio Bedini himself–a polymathic mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic bishop. He created magnificent maps, globes, and scientific instruments, including astrolabes. Unlike the author of our now second-oldest book, Danti published in Italian, using the common tongue rather than Latin to appeal to a broader audience.

The second Bedini book I want to highlight is another Italian marvel, Antonio Cagnoli’s “De’Due Orologi Italiano E Francese.” Though this book was published in 1787 (practically yesterday compared to Danti) the copy in our library is one of only a few known to exist in the world (title page, image 5).

This book focuses on “Italian time,” a traditional method of timekeeping where a day began at sunset with the hour 1, and ended at the next sunset with hour 24. Because the system made sunset its benchmark, it was helpful for people to figure out how much time they had left before it got dark and they could no longer work without artificial light. You can see an example of a clock with a dial showing Italian hours in this article about St Mark’s Clock in Venice. Around the time Cagnoli’s book was published, Italians were already switching over to what is called in the book “French time,” which was the standard in many parts of Europe. Napoleon’s invasion of Italy a few years later may have hastened this conversion.

Anyone who’s read my previous articles knows I’m somewhat obsessed with marginalia–the things people write in books, the scrawls and smudges that show how people really use and love them. In image 6, you can see some handwritten annotations in “De’Due Orologi Italiano E Francese.” On the left, a cartoon pointing hand (called a manicule) denotes a part of the text that a reader found important, much like an 18th-century highlighter. It points to a section about the time issues that result from the fact that the length of the day on Earth varies depending on the season–the idea of solar versus sidereal time. Below, penciled horological calculations try to work out something about how the number of minutes in a day changes as the season changes. Perhaps the reader was a little bit confused by the text, because there’s a lone question mark hovering in the right-hand margin.

You’ll notice that both of these books are in Italian. Bedini, though from Connecticut, certainly collected many books in Italian, and I took the opportunity of the book sale to enhance our relatively slim collections in that language (we have far more in German and French). Aside from the bookplates, some of the books show other marks of Bedini’s usage and indications of his interest.

In a 1954 catalog of objects in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence (now Museo Galileo), red pencil circles document specific items he must have found intriguing, such as two Italian telescopes made out of cardboard in the 17th century. Bedini was clearly fascinated by the shared history of early scientific instruments, how things like the microscope, the telescope, and the sundial fit together to help us explain and measure our complicated world. Image 7 shows a photograph I found tucked in the same book. If you can identify the instrument in the photo, let me know.

The unidentified photo hints at other mysteries in Bedini’s books I have yet to explore. One book, for instance, appears to be a commemoration of the electric clocks of Lecce in southern Italy, which the author claims was on the cutting edge when it introduced public electric clocks in 1868. (Electric clocks as a whole were invented in 1840.) I’d love to learn more about why the small city of Lecce became a beacon of the electric clock revolution, and if any of their 19th-century clocks are still there today.

Similarly, I’m now fascinated by the career of James Ferguson, a Scottish astronomer who published a volume of collected lectures in 1825 (title page, image 8). Is the math accurate on his calculation showing “the mean time of any New or Full Moon, or Eclipse, from the creation of the world to the year of Christ 5800”? Has anyone ever tried to build his surreal-looking “universal dial” (image 9) which shows the time on different parts of the globe by the use of shadows only?

I don’t currently know the answers to these questions, but I’m looking forward to finding out. Bedini’s books, once in his home or office in Washington, now in our library in Manhattan, are a papery bridge between scholars of different generations. Just touching them, smelling them, I can feel the intensity of Bedini’s enthusiasm for knowledge–not just “tidbits,” but rather whole reams of esoteric information and uncovered stories. In using these books, I hope visitors to the library will be able to feel it too. And I hope Bedini would approve.

Horological Society of New York 4/25/24 Horological Society of New York 4/25/24

Reading Time at HSNY: See You in the Chat Room

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY. Today’s article is guest-written by our intern, St John Karp, a graduate student in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute.

*Image 1: Swatch Skin “Silverize” (2000) displaying the time as @922 beats.*

Alternative Ways of Telling the Time

In 1999 Swatch launched a satellite into orbit around the planet Earth. Sputnik 99 (or “Beatnik”) carried a radio transmitter designed to synchronize the time for Swatch’s “.beat” line of watches. These watches could tell the time using conventional hours, minutes, and seconds, but their selling point was that they could also display the time using Internet Time, a Swatch initiative backed by MIT that divided the day into 1,000 beats. The director of MIT’s Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte, channeling the argot of the dot-com era, said, “Cyberspace has no seasons and no night and day. Internet Time is absolute time for everybody. Internet Time is not geopolitical. It is global. In the future, for many people, real time will be Internet Time.”

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) has an extensive collection of ephemera in its library, and during my internship, I was able to dig up a number of Swatch catalogs from the late 1990s and early 2000s that showcase Swatch’s attempt to reinvent time (see image 1).

Decimal time and alternative time-keeping systems have a history as long and checkered as my pajama pants. The French revolutionaries in the 1790s proposed decimal units of time as part of the Republican calendar, which reinvented the calendar with new months and seasons and set the year One as the first year of the French Republic. Horologists such as Louis Berthoud made clocks and watches that displayed this metric time, and several of HSNY’s books detail the history of these gorgeous pieces (image 2). Sadly the Republican calendar did not outlast the revolution, though I’ve calculated that my birthday would have fallen on the first day of Thermidor — the month when people tended to get assassinated.

*Image 2: A French Revolution-era clock with a ten-hour dial, from “La Révolution dans la Mesure du Temps,” a book in HSNY’s library.*

In a similar vein, Fritz Lang depicted a 10-hour clock in his film Metropolis, both as an aspect of the film’s futurism but also as a symbol of the mechanization of humanity. In the same film, a man is made to function as a machine part by physically moving the hands on a large dial to match a sequence of light bulbs (image 3). Traditional Chinese timekeeping uses the shí, a unit of measure that divides the day into 12 hours (an interesting parallel to Western timekeeping). However, it also employs the kè, which represents one-hundredth of a day and places it squarely in the category of decimal time.

*Image 3: A man clings to the hand of a ten-hour clock in “Metropolis” (1927).*

The main reason a decimal clock failed to take off in Western timekeeping might be mathematical. When an hour has sixty minutes, a third of an hour is a round number that lines up with the twenty-minute mark. A decimal clock, on the other hand, with one hundred “minutes” in an hour, would mean that a third of an hour would be 33 ⅓ minutes and would not align with any indicators on the clock face. The twenty-four-hour day and sixty-minute hour are in fact so convenient that, in training simulations for the planet Mars, NASA employs a time system that simply stretches Earth hours and seconds to last slightly longer and sync up with the Martian day.

Perhaps another reason decimal time never caught the popular imagination is because it carries an element of the uncanny. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four famously opens with, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The thought of a clock striking thirteen is so unnatural that it can presage the horrors of living under a totalitarian state. In Eugène Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano the clock strikes as many as 29 times while two couples engage in alienating and unsettling dialog (see image 4). Like the distorted sense of space in Gothic literature, a clock that strikes the wrong number disorients us and fills us with a sense of dread.

*Image 4: From “The Bald Soprano”: “[The clock] is contradictory and always indicates the opposite of what the hour really is.”*

Don’t be fooled by the wreckage of the past, though. Decimal time is alive and well. Every Unix computer since the 1970s, which includes your MacBook and your Android phone, keeps track of the time in seconds elapsed since the beginning of the “epoch” (January 1, 1970). This number, currently somewhere in the one billion seven-hundred millions, is due for a reckoning in the year 2038 when it will grow so large it will overflow the computer’s ability to store it, similar to the crisis that happened in the late 1990s with the Y2K bug.

Of course if computer programmers are the only ones using alternative time systems today, they’re also the only ones joking about them. The furlong-firkin-fortnight (FFF) system of units uses the fortnight as the basis of its timekeeping. Paired with SI units this makes the microfortnight equal to approximately 1.2 seconds. The same sense of humor is probably responsible for the fact that Linux computers can still tell the date using the calendar of the Discordian religion (a stoner-inspired parody in a similar vein to the Flying Spaghetti Monster). My computer informs me that today is Sweetmorn, the thirteenth day of Discord in the Year of Our Lady Discordia 3190.

Talk of computers brings me back to the dot-com era when the Internet was still shiny and new. Swatch had toyed with engaging in internet culture as early as 1996 when they released a watch that made prominent use of the @ sign (see image 5). Swatch, holding fast to the @ as an indicator of internet cred, repurposed it in 1998 as the beat symbol for their Internet Time. The premise of this timekeeping system was that it would be the same number of beats in any location around the world, neatly defenestrating the entire concept of time zones but failing to replace them with anything else. You could say to your friend in Norway or Australia, “Meet me in the chat room at @722 beats,” but you would have no idea whether 722 beats would be early in the morning or late at night. Swatch, perhaps guiltily aware of the flaw in their system, appeared to draw attention to it in a promotional video in which a man is woken up by a friend calling from a different country because the friend is using Internet time and doesn’t understand how early he’s calling. The two go back and forth about what time it really is, but the friend doesn’t get the concept of time zones now that he’s discovered Internet time.

*Image 6: Swatch Skin “Shadiness” (2000) displaying the time as @431 beats.*

The Planck time is the shortest unit of time possible given the laws of physics, but that is still longer than Swatch’s ill-starred satellite was operational. It ran afoul of commercial broadcasting regulations and had its batteries removed shortly before it was released into orbit from the Mir space station. It was decommissioned before they even pushed it through the airlock, and became garbage floating in space. Internet Time persisted as a key part of Swatch’s digital offerings for the next few years but the catalogs in HSNY’s library show that Internet Time had largely dropped off the radar by about 2003. The official Internet Time website, however, is still online and loyally informing me that it’s @583 beats right now. See you in the chat room!

Horological Society of New York 3/29/24 Horological Society of New York 3/29/24

Reading Time at HSNY: Diamonds Are a Watch’s Best Friend

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

For much of the past few centuries, watchmaking comfortably occupied a position as part of the jewelry trade. It’s one reason why journals in our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) often contain references to both, as is the case with the German title “Schmuck und Uhren.” Uhren means watches, and if you’re familiar with Yiddish, don’t worry, it’s okay to say schmuck in German–it just means jewelry.

An issue from the first year of publication of “Jeweler’s Weekly,” dated March 3, 1886, demonstrates the connections between the trades. In New York, jewelers had already established a thriving business district on Maiden Lane. This area near the southern tip of Manhattan was the center of the jewelry trade, including watchmaking, from around 1800 through the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, one of HSNY’s founders, George Schmid, had a watch repair shop just off Maiden Lane in the 1880s.

The “Jeweler’s Weekly” office address is printed on the front cover of the magazine: 41-43 Maiden Lane, a few doors down from what would be the Diamond Exchange, an early skyscraper reinforced to support the weight of jewelers’ heavy safes. The cover (image 1) shows a clock in the lower left corner, and is subtitled “A journal for the jewelry diamond watch silver ware & kindred trades.” (Unrelated, a couple of cupids in the sky above send a message of love by telegraph.)

A two-page spread inside the magazine (image 2) shows an inventory of some of the most well-known watch manufacturers at the time. On the American side: Waltham, Elgin, and Illinois. On the Swiss: James Nardin (cousin of Ulysse), and Vacheron & Constantin. There are also some less familiar names including the “Lady Racine” watch pictured, as well as Bryant & Bentley, seller of “fancy stone rings.” Much like today, there’s a healthy market for imitation gems, including one brand of imitation diamonds called “solar brilliants.”

On another page, the Illinois watch company advertises “the smallest American watch made” with an engraving showing the movement, presumably at actual size, about 33 mm (image 3). An advertisement I particularly enjoy, for Abbott’s patent stem-winding attachment, shows a caricature before and after: a grumpy-looking man with mutton chops is upset because “his watch has run down and his key is in the pocket of his other pantaloons” (image 4). On the right, his face is alight–Abbott’s stem-winding attachment has ensured that he is never again in this sad position!

Abbott’s invention essentially transforms a key-wound watch into a stem-wound watch, that you could wind with just your fingers. This advertisement came out around the time when watches transitioned from key-winding to crown winding (hence the “great reduction” in the price of key-winding movements above). So the problem Abbott’s attachment solves would not be a common one for much longer.

I include this curiosity not to mock our glum, keyless friend, but rather to undercut the impression many of us have of people from this period, mainly from posed photographs, as serious, somber, and humorless. They knew how to have fun in 1886, as anyone who’s watched The Gilded Age this season will know! The watch and jewelry trade was no exception.

Ads also show how peripheral trades served the same clientele and marketed themselves toward jewelers: makers of “fine cut glass,” china, silverware, spectacles, thimbles, buttons, pens, display cases, music boxes, and something called an “automatic eye-glass holder.” People working in these trades often made use of the same materials and techniques as watchmakers, and sometimes occupied the same workshops. If you could engrave a spoon handle, you could probably engrave a watch case, and people in New York in the late 19th century were doing both.

As far as non-advertising content, there isn’t much in the magazine, but there are updates on new technology, job postings, and industry surveys in various countries. Columns tell jewelers the industry news of the week, including information about robberies (“A paper of diamonds was seized…under peculiar circumstances”) and about people in the profession (“John [Redacted], an old Cleveland, Ohio, jeweler, is insane.”)

For New York jewelers, there are more detailed updates about members of the community, even covering minutiae like one Mr. Bliss’s troublesome knee inflammation! Again, far be it from me to mock Mr. Bliss, who was just getting ready to go out West on a selling trip before his knee acted up. Rather, the level of concern and care among the community is touching. It reminds me of the early members of HSNY, who founded the organization to support each other and their loved ones, providing a stipend when members were unable to work. In 2020, HSNY revived this spirit to support working watchmakers through the pandemic.

In addition to the “Jewelers Weekly,” our library features a number of volumes of the “Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone,” a merger of several related magazines which is still published today as JCK. I know that this publication was an early part of our collection because one of the volumes is stamped in gold “property of the Horological Society of New York.”

I can’t capture everything that goes on in the many pages of this magazine, but its earlier issues are full of stunning Art Nouveau-style illustrations, as shown in images 5 and 6—covers from 1903 and 1911, respectively. Advertisements of the early 20th century feature trendy items of the time such as railroad watches, auto clocks, leak-proof fountain pens, and electric lighted signs for businesses. Although some of the content focuses on the business part of the jewelry trade, a “Technical Department” feature in the magazine includes “lessons” by noted horologists on topics like “The Influence of the Escapement on the Isochronal Vibrations of the Balance.”

Later issues start to use eye-catching photography and color on the cover to lure readers (see image 7). A read-through of the 1950 volume of “Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone” shows how jewelry provided women an entry point into the horological trade, and not just as models or muses. In the January issue, a story with photographs features Edwina Duvall, a high school senior in Pasadena who decides to enter the profession (image 8). She gets a job with a jewelry shop owner who is at first skeptical that it might be a young girl’s “romantic” idea to work there, just a “passing whim.” After only a week, however, the shop owner is convinced of her aptitude, and upon her graduation, he offers her a full-time job, saying she knows as much about the business as those who’ve been in it for years. For her part, Edwina is thrilled that she’s already made several sales over $300, including watches selling for around $150 (about $1,900 today.)

JCK had a national audience, but for those interested in New York history, the ads in this 1950 edition of the magazine, which list the addresses of businesses, clearly show that the center of gravity for the trade had shifted. Jewelers no longer call Maiden Lane home and have moved to the Diamond District on West 47th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues–where the jewelry industry still thrives today, just three short blocks from HSNY headquarters. A recent ABC News piece filmed in our library and classroom, below, features interviews with female entrepreneurs of the Diamond District, who would have made Edwina in Pasadena proud.

In a “High Snobiety” article that quotes HSNY Deputy Director Carolina Navarro, Scarlett Baker writes that watches have more recently become dominant in store windows in the district due to demand: “47th Street has etched itself on the horological map as the place to go in the US for rare Rolexes, niche Patek Philippes, and Audemars Piguets. And the street’s promise of hard-to-come-by haute horology is second only to the knowledgeable merchants that occupy it.” Image 9 shows a tableau of the Diamond District during the evening rush hour, with its iconic diamond-shaped street lights visible above the swirl of pedestrians and flashing neon.

Although we still subscribe to jewelry-related journals at HSNY and they’re always available for perusal at our library, I wanted to include a mention of a few non-periodical books. One is the recent Bulgari: Beyond Time, a very beautiful and hefty coffee table volume that you might be able to spot in one of the pictures in my article about big and small books. Other items in our collection focus on watchmakers who are also known for their jewelry, like Cartier, or on techniques that apply to jewelry, like engraving on precious metal. We even have two new books about the Diamond District written by authors with personal connections to 47th Street, “Diamond Stories” by Renée Rose Shield and “Precious Objects” by Alicia Oltuski.

Looking at these books and magazines reminds us that watches are and have always been jewelry. They’re not only jewelry–they also occupy a position of some practicality that other pieces of jewelry might not–but they proudly belong to the trade. If you walk down 47th Street today, you’ll see that the heritage of horological jewelry is alive and ticking, glittering at you from behind thick glass, shining out into the loud, bright city night.

Horological Society of New York 2/27/24 Horological Society of New York 2/27/24

Reading Time at HSNY: All Books Great and Small

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

When it comes to watches, they come in all sizes. Bigger is not necessarily better. There are dainty dials, shining with miniature detail above equally minute movements, marvels of micromechanics. There are huge slabs that look like they need their own checked luggage tags. And there are medium-sized watches that try to be all things to all people–as ubiquitous as a Toyota Camry.

The same goes for books. Today I’ll share with you some of the biggest and smallest specimens in the HSNY library. Some are so large they could be used as solar shades (if we weren’t concerned about UV damage to the books) while others could be smuggled in your cheek.

The big books in the library were easy for me to find because, well, they announce their presence. They’re the Panerais in the room, beefy, all-around chonks. If you’re a librarian who works with them, you can go ahead and skip arm day. In image 1, you can see a selection of our biggest books, with two 750 mL bottles for scale. Their publication dates range from 1765 to 2023.

One prominent, incredibly unwieldy book in our collection is J. P. Morgan’s catalog of watches (the red book in image 1). This might sound familiar, because the name J. P. Morgan is even more omnipresent in American life than a Toyota Camry. Morgan, a financier, was a collector of many things, not just clocks and watches–a visit to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City will give you a sense of the scale of his collection of rare books, fine art, gems, and other objects. Morgan donated his watches to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1913, where they remain to this day. We have a copy of Morgan’s illustrated collection catalog.

Morgan produced a very limited number of hand-colored editions of this catalog printed on vellum and finished with bits of real gold. One of these copies sold in 2012 for $26,000, and you can see a few pictures of the sumptuous illustrations here. In our library, we have a more modest facsimile in black and white, but even the facsimile is quite a rare book. Pound for pound, it’s also one of the heaviest in our collection at 13 pounds, 12 ounces, roughly the weight of a plump cat. It measures 15 inches tall by 12 inches wide and is over four inches thick (in image 2, a can of sparkling water for scale.)

Image 3, a plate from Morgan’s collection catalog, shows a silver watch in the shape of a skull, a popular motif when this watch was produced, around 1600. Watches of this type are intended as a kind of memento mori, meaning that every time you look at this watch, you should think about how you’re one second closer to your inevitable death. Its jaw unhinges to reveal the movement in its mouth. Snap, your time’s up!

In image 4, a relatively tamer watch from 1660, made by Henry Grendon, displaying an intricate engraved dial covered by an octagonal-cut rock crystal. The outer case, shown below the watch, is made of shagreen, which is processed shark or rayfish skin. Even though the color isn’t visible in this version, you can see the pebbly, bubbly texture of the shagreen, further ornamented by silver stars. The catalog’s enormous plates, replicating the details of a watch in real size, are what make the book so desirable and expensive, then as now.

One of the oldest big books in our library is Diderot’s “Encyclopédie,” coming in at 16 inches tall by 10 ½ inches wide (image 5, no trick photography used). Denis Diderot edited this famous work in the second half of the 18th century, during the Age of Enlightenment, when a group of authors hoped to present a secular, all-encompassing version of scientific and cultural knowledge. The encyclopedia consisted of 28 volumes, with a full 11 of them made up of plates (engraved, printed illustrations). We have only one part of one volume, which includes the plates from the section on Horlogerie. Because that’s the only one we care about, n’est-ce pas?

Our volume, published in 1765, contains 64 plates, alongside an editorial text that is 25 pages long, most of it a detailed description of each of the images. (The encyclopedia entry for “horology,” attributed to renowned horologist Ferdinand Berthoud, was published separately from these plates.)

I won’t be able to include many of these incredible images, but you can see high-resolution scans of all of them on this academic website: the first section contains 51 images while the second section contains 13 additional images.

Some plates illustrate movements by particular watchmakers, like the equation clock by Berthoud pictured in image 6. Some focus on horological tools, from those still familiar to a modern watchmaker (image 7) to those that may now appear less familiar (a machine for experiments on the friction of pivots in image 8). Other exploded schematics show all the parts of a watch or clock (image 9) or specific features like a repeater (image 10).

Our smallest books were harder for me to find in the library than the big ones, but once found, they excel in usefulness. Imagine, someone challenges your escapement knowledge in a social situation. But then…you pull out your four-by-six travel-sized copy of “An Analysis of the Lever Escapement” and confidently prove that it was in fact Thomas Mudge who first applied the detached lever escapement to watches around 1754. Your friends applaud wildly. You’re suddenly invited to the best parties. Your life changes forever.

One such practical pocket-book is another Berthoud classic originally published in 1759, “L’Art de conduire et de régles les pendules et les montres” (or “How to manage and regulate clocks and watches.") Our copy is a fourth edition that was printed in Paris in 1811 and measures about 6 ½ inches tall by 4 inches wide.

Berthoud greatly expanded on his earlier written work in “Essai sur L'horlogerie,” the first edition of which appeared in 1763. Here at HSNY, we have first and second editions in our rare books case. They’re gorgeous, but they’re a solid medium size, so I’m not going to write about them in detail here. You can come and see them in our library in person, or look at one of several high-quality scans of other copies on Google Books.

Lest you think we have only a big Berthoud (“Encyclopédie”), a medium Berthoud (“Essai”), and a small Berthoud (“L’Art de Conduire”), we actually have an EVEN TINIER Berthoud, this time in German. This book, originally published in 1828, is in fact a translation of “L’Art de conduire et de régles les pendules et les montres,” rendered in German as “Die Kunst mit Pendel- und Taschenuhren umzugehen und sie zu reguliren” (see both mini Berthoud and micro Bethoud in image 11, with a loupe for scale). Our copy is a little speck of an edition printed in Berlin in 1989, and it measures just three inches by four inches. A glance at image 12 (with a hand for scale) shows this book reproduces in facsimile the original fraktur typeface, which many German publishers used well into the 20th century. If you’re not used to it, it can be difficult to read even in a larger size.

Image 13 shows three books together: a tiny reproduction image from “Die Kunst mit Pendel- und Taschenuhren…”; the original fold-out plate from the small “L’Art de conduire…les montres”; and, on the bottom layer, a similar illustration from Diderot’s giant “Encyclopédie.” What is amazing is that the artist of the small engraving was able to convey nearly as much detail as the artist of the larger work, albeit with slightly less image clarity. Both images manage to show multiple aspects of movement construction, including a fusée.

You could imagine the tiny book being useful to a working watchmaker or clockmaker two hundred years ago. If you needed a quick consultation at the bench, you could keep this book within arm’s reach.

Similarly, in the 20th century, watchmakers used planners or diaries to organize their lives and to have convenient access to useful information; we have a collection of over 50 of these agendas in our library dating from 1878 through 1971. Image 14 shows them above a shelf of very large books including Morgan’s catalog and two copies of Diderot’s encyclopedia.

Image 15 shows a selection of colorful agendas in chronological order: 1906, 1924, 1939, and 1953. Two are in German and two in French. The 1924 and 1939 volumes show advertisements on the covers, but almost all of these agendas contain ads inside. In image 16, the same books are arranged in clockwise order from top left, and you can see the advertisements that grace the inside covers.

In 1906, for instance, the inside front cover shows an American-style factory in Schramberg, Germany called the Hamburg American Clock Factory, which later merged with Junghans. Two smokestacks rise high over the long brick buildings, where the ad says they are producing fantasy clocks, tall case clocks, hanging clocks and the “cheapest, most beautiful house clocks.”

I was surprised to find that the tabs inside the planners, indicating different sections, also highlight the ad pages, so that the 1924 agenda contains, for example, one tab leading directly to a table showing the price of postage, and one tab advertising Ulysse Nardin chronometers and watches. Then as now, brands no doubt paid for prime placement that would get them noticed by the largest number of working watchmakers.

These planners include other useful features like a loop for storing a pen or pencil, tables of common measurements, horological dictionaries, brand indices, a section for recording receipts, and a ruler. The ruler on the spine of the 1924 volume shows it’s a petite 15 centimeters long, just under 6 inches and shorter than an iPhone (image 17). Despite their useful nature, most of our copies don’t seem to have been written in, though there are exceptions where some watchmaker has scribbled a calculation or an appointment time.

A question this article raises is, why are some books so big and some are so small? This is not a stupid question. In fact, it’s so smart that I don’t have one answer for you. The answer is a combination of factors like cost of production, regularity of use, and the intended audience for the books when they were published. Was this book going to live in a library and serve as a reference for researchers? Or was it going to get carried around in a pocket and whipped out in the workshop? Did someone want to wow their visitors in a grand home, or impress their boss with their ability to fix something without assistance? Just like watches, books exist at an intersection of function, style, and artisanship, and some lean more heavily into one of these three priorities. A book isn’t just a bodiless container for information–it has its own corporeal presence, and it’s telling you more than just what’s in the text.

Horological Society of New York 1/30/24 Horological Society of New York 1/30/24

Reading Time at HSNY: Sex and Its Complications

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

Many watch collectors will tell you that watches can be sexy. Usually the adjective is interpretive, not literal–watches make us feel something, give us a flutter or a wink, increase our sense of confidence or attraction. But what about watches that are literally sexy? What about watches that reproduce sex acts on the small scale of micromechanics?

I was quoted in an article about erotic watches that was published in The New York Times on Valentine’s Day in 2023, and in honor of the return of that romantic period I thought I would share some more details from my research. My main sources are two books from the Horological Society of New York library, “Hours of Love” by Roland Carrera (1993), and “Erotische Uhren” by Christoph Prignitz (2004). Although these books are richly illustrated, I won’t be able to include many of the images in this article because they’re too explicit–all the more reason to visit our library in person and do your own research!

Erotic watches feature miniature images of sexual scenes on the dial or caseback of the watch, often hidden behind a decorative metal cover that springs open to reveal a secret painting. On some of these watches, tiny human automata (sometimes called jaquemarts) move when the watch runs, simulating sex acts. That type of moving erotica wouldn’t have been easily available elsewhere in the age before film.

You can see a couple of tamer examples in images 1 and 2, from the book “Erotische Uhren.” On the watch in image 1, a repeater from about 1820, a soldier stands next to a young lady in a flowing yellow dress with an elaborate hairdo, who is holding her hand to her mouth as if laughing. On the back of the case, the source of the lady’s mischievous expression is revealed: her dress is hiked up and the soldier’s hand is on her bottom. The two lovers on the watch in image 2, a French example from around 1800, are similarly discreet. She touches his face tenderly as they gaze into each other’s eyes. When the metal frame is opened, they’re having sex under their clothes.

In the 18th century, erotic watches were a status symbol. They were expensive and not designed for practicality. Their heyday in the late 18th century was a period in France where mistresses and courtesans were a part of the aristocratic, libertine lifestyle, and middle-class people might try to emulate that perceived sexual freedom through acquiring erotica.

During the same period in the 18th century, there was also a flourishing of erotic literature in Europe, including novels like “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill),” by John Cleland and “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, as well as the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Erotic watches reflected the broader literary and artistic taste of the time. In “Erotische Uhren,” Prignitz talks about how these watches combined the idea of rationality and discipline (measuring time precisely, being on time) with uncontrolled sensuality and passion. They’re something hidden in plain sight, breaking a taboo in a place you wouldn’t expect.

In 18th-century Europe, since aristocratic men were the main audience for these watches, the erotic images were tailored to their tastes. They often feature “classical” or even biblical themes that would have been familiar to those with access to private education, including Leda and the Swan, nymphs and satyrs, and Venus and Adonis. Other common scenes are bawdy stories from Boccaccio's “Decameron,” the sins of priests or clergymen, lusty nuns, cheating wives being caught by their husbands, and the seduction of female servants and shepherdesses.

For those unfamiliar with the sexual mores of past centuries, the subjects of these watches can be surprisingly diverse. There are watches with homosexual scenes, as well as people from different races and social classes. They sometimes include three or more participants enthusiastically enjoying each others’ bodies. During this period, colonization encouraged an idealized concept of freer, more natural sensuality among the people of colonized nations than among white Europeans. So a subset of erotic watches depicted sex scenes involving African and Asian characters.

Later on, there was a period when watchmakers adorned erotic watches with photographs instead of enamel paintings. In Image 3, an early 20th-century watch shows a series of photographs of naked women, printed on a rotating wheel underneath the dial. With a few exceptions, though, the subjects of erotic watches haven’t changed much since the 18th century; some of the more recent pieces are reproductions of earlier designs.

Who was making these expensive and highly specialized pieces? In the 18th century, most of these watches were created anonymously or with false signatures, mainly by French and Swiss manufacturers. Watchmakers didn’t want to damage the reputation of Swiss manufacturing by signing erotic watches for export. Also, there were repeated efforts to suppress erotic watch production, most notably in Geneva in the early 19th century.

Some of the watches pictured in this article, however, are signed, like the one in image 4, produced by Breguet & Fils in about 1850 and pictured in the book “Hours of Love.” It shows a relatively modest scene of two women and one man in Roman-style dress, their intimacies strategically obscured by the dial. Similarly, we know that these watches were sometimes commissioned for a specific owner, but owners tended to keep their identities private, so the historical record is slim.

Although their popularity declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, erotic watches were certainly made into the 1990s with some regularity, including by Blancpain, Svend Andersen, and Jacquet Droz. Today, manufacturers of erotic watches no longer hide their identities. The Richard Mille 69 Tourbillon Erotic was manufactured in 2015 and worn by the rapper Drake in 2019. Inventively, it uses words, rather than images, to convey a sexy statement: three rollers engraved with interchangeable phrases function kind of like an erotic slot machine.

The Jacob & Co. Caligula with “concealed erotic scene” is another recent addition, as is the Ulysse Nardin “Classico Manara” series featuring a woman/mermaid romance told over the course of ten watches. People are still innovating in the service of erotic art, as evidenced by a sketch I found folded in our copy of “Erotische Uhren.” The anonymous reader was attempting to figure out the mechanics behind some erotic automata, perhaps hoping to create a watch of their own (image 5).

Looking at these watches in a social context, they served as a way for rich men to connect over private sexual jokes. However, even though these watches mostly portrayed women according to men’s fantasies, they could also show women with sexual agency, seeking out and enjoying sex. In an introduction to a 1997 Antiquorum auction catalog in our library that features erotic watches, Dr. Ruth Westheimer (yes, the Dr. Ruth!) puts forward a sex-positive view of them, writing “a couple can both share in the joys of beholding the incredible precision of the tiny movements, which will not only amaze in their intricacy, but most certainly trigger the sparks that later can ignite more fevered passions.”

In “Hours of Love,” Carrera has a similar take. He coyly calls erotic watches “conversation pieces.” The conversation part comes in because, according to Carrera, “their purpose was to allow a man to entertain a lady in conversation which might then lead to a meeting of the minds or possibly bodies.” From my view, I think calling these watches “conversation pieces” illustrates something about how watches can have complicated, multilayered meanings. Watches participate in a broader cultural conversation, speaking about what their owners find valuable, interesting, or romantic. Again, erotic watches have never been openly accepted or publicly embraced; yet they persist, signifying a part of our culture that never gives up the impulse to shock and arouse.

Horological Society of New York 1/2/24 Horological Society of New York 1/2/24

Reading Time at HSNY: Women in Horology

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

If you’ve been paying attention to my articles, you’ll know they often note the ways that women show up peripherally in our library collection at HSNY: as loving inscribers and anonymous students; underage or endangered workers in watch factories; and horological tourists marveling at public clocks.

The women I’m writing about today, however, are not on the margins. They’re main characters of horology, people with enduring influence as authors, collectors, and makers. Many had an impact beyond their lifetimes, and all overcame gendered barriers to their participation in horology.

The early writers: Mary Booth, Mary Howitt

From the 19th century comes the tale of two Marys, both female pioneers in horological writing. Mary Booth, a polymathic American author, was the first editor-in-chief of “Harper’s Bazaar,”one of the first fashion magazines in the country. She wrote or translated at least 47 books in seven languages, including several that were influential in gathering support for anti-slavery causes during the Civil War.

She published “The Clock and Watchmakers’ Manual” in 1860, a selection of technical and historical writings by different authors originally written in French. We have a copy in our library at HSNY. She’s listed as the author, but the use of the initials “M. L. Booth” on the title page suggests the publisher was aware that a woman’s name on a horological textbook might not be a selling point. (The publisher, John Wiley, still exists, and focuses on technical and scientific publications.)

Though she calls herself a “compiler” in the preface, Booth has done much more. Her preface relates a succinct history of timekeeping from the first water clocks to the most precise marine chronometers, demonstrating her own knowledge of the topic.

Six detailed fold-out plates show how to assemble watches. Multiple plates picture the inside of an 18th-century watch from different viewpoints (see image 1). The work is deeply historical, and highlights technical features of different watches from well-known watchmakers of previous centuries.

On the other side of the Atlantic, prolific Victorian author Mary Howitt published “My Uncle the Clockmaker” in 1845. Our copy is signed in pencil, in a delicate hand, “Miss Elizabeth Nichols from her sister Eunice,” showing that women actually read this book, and found it interesting enough to give as a gift. It’s part of a series called “Tales for the People and their Children.”

Howitt’s “tales” are a loosely connected set of stories about British country life. In the story, Nicholas, the young son of a gentleman, apprentices himself to a clockmaker, much to the chagrin of his father who sees it as a “degradation.” His mother, however, recognizes the worth of his new profession: “The first gold watch which he could put together to his own satisfaction, was presented by him to her on her birth-day [sic], and was worn by her with delight.” A shrewd customer, she appreciates the value of independent watchmaking. Nicholas soon sets up a successful trade, amazing “the country people, who were willing to carry watches as large as turnips” with his “lovely little gold and silver watches.”

Nicholas singlehandedly starts a rage for watches in his small community: “...what wonders had Nicholas to exhibit and explain to the customers. The consequence was, that scarcely a person within twenty miles round was now satisfied with his watch. He or she must have one of the new construction…There was no talk but about levers, escape movements, chronometers and engine-turning, and ornamental engraving of cases.” Most of the rest of the book takes place without Nicholas: at the height of his trade, he mysteriously disappears, only to reappear in disguise decades later to rescue his family estate with his entrepreneurial fortune. It’s a Victorian tale of triumph for anyone who has felt undervalued as a watchmaker, or indeed anyone whose parents disapprove of their chosen career!

The Correspondent: Emily Faithfull

Unlike the authors above, the 19th-century writer and activist Emily Faithfull addresses the topic of female watchmakers–in her case, women and girls working at the Elgin factory in Illinois. Faithfull, who was British, visited America for the first time in 1872 and included an account of the Elgin factory in her book, “Three Visits to America” (1884).

Faithfull was a women’s rights pioneer who advocated for the employment of women in many different trades including printing and watchmaking. On her first visit to America, she recounts receiving an engraved watch with a letter that reads: “The hands of the many working-women who have been busy in its fashioning are thus extended to you in sincerest appreciation of the work you are doing ‘in helping others to help themselves.’”

Intrigued, she visits the factory years later, where she sees women working with lathes, making hairsprings, and cutting jewels. She writes approvingly: “In London it takes an apprentice seven years to learn what a girl machinist becomes a proficient in after the first twelve months' work.” Women are “earning good wages” at Elgin, but they still are paid less than men. The combination of the factory system and female workers means that “while it takes about seventy hours of skilled hand labor to manufacture a watch [in England], it can be produced [in America] in thirty hours by girl operatives.”

An unsigned 1869 article from “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine” contains a similar account of women and young girls working in the Elgin factory (then known as the National Watch Company), work which could sometimes be dangerous (I covered this in my article about children’s books at HSNY).* According to the article, employees “are equally divided between the sexes” and women are earning six to twelve dollars a week, while men are earning three dollars a day. The Harper’s article, unlike Faithfull’s book, is illustrated. Image 2 shows rows of women at work in the “train room,” some operating lathes in front of tall windows at the right.

As I have discussed in some of my other articles, women were a ubiquitous presence in watch manufacturing from the 18th century onward. In 20th-century America, women suffered ghastly illnesses as a result of radium exposure while painting luminescent dials. Female students studied alongside men at watchmaking schools, as evidenced by the signed notebooks we have at our library.

Although women signed their names on dials as early as the 18th century, few women have achieved recognition as individual watchmakers; Rebecca Struthers, discussed below, is one modern example, as is Danièla Dufour, though they are by no means the only ones.

The Collector: Laura Hearn

Among the many catalogs of watch collections we hold in our library, one stood out to me because of the name on the spine: “Mrs. George A. Hearn’s Collection of Watches.” Although today there is a thriving community of female watch collectors, this is the only catalog I’ve found in our collection with a woman’s name on it (well, nearly, because it’s still under her husband’s name).

Like many female collectors, Laura Frances Hoppock Hearn collected alongside her husband, George A. Hearn. An article about her probate in the New York Times in May 1917 mentioned her bequest of a collection of laces to the Metropolitan Museum, as well as the collection of “many ancient and quaintly-wrought timepieces.”

According to an obituary from the “Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” Hearn, who was “characteristically a New Yorker,” was “deeply interested in the city and its progressive life and development.”

Hearn loaned her watches to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907, and had a catalog of the watches privately printed in the same year. A look at the frontispiece of the book (image 3) shows that Hearn collected big names in horology like Berthoud, but also stunningly decorative enameled watches in different shapes, like the butterfly in the center of the image. Our copy of the catalog contains the Hearns’ joint calling card (image 5), including their address on East 69th Street, then, as now, an expensive old-money address in New York City (something you’ll recognize if you watch “The Gilded Age”!).

Another female collector of the same era, Jeannette Atwater Dwight Bliss, lived a block away from Hearn on East 68th Street. Alongside her banker husband, George T. Bliss, she bought thousands of fine art objects, including clocks, and examples of European architecture, which were later donated to the Newark Museum. Other famous female collectors include royals like Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette, Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Fabergé collector Marjorie Merriweather Post, and French decorative arts collector Jayne Wrightsman.**

Modern Authors

In the 21st century, more women have entered into the world of published horological scholarship. One book that I often recommend to researchers in our library is Genevieve Cummins’ “How the Watch was Worn: A Fashion for 500 Years.” According to a review by our library’s patron, Fortunat Mueller-Maerki: “It has been about 500 years since people started carrying timekeeping devices around with them on their bodies, so it is a bit surprising that until now there has never been a publication dedicated to the question of ‘How to wear a watch?’”

Cummins’ real achievement in this book is sourcing more than a thousand historical images of people of all genders wearing watches in all manner of surprising styles: on the wrist or on a chain, yes, but also on a chatelaine, as a ring, embedded in a handbag or lighter or snuffbox, as a pin, or as a hair accessory.

Image 6 shows a spread from the book focused on nurses, all wearing watches that helped them care for their patients. Image 7 features ring watches, buttonhole and cufflink watches from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, as well as advertising materials.

A recent internet analogue to this book would be Malaika Crawford’s “How To Wear It” articles for Hodinkee, in which she pairs a particular watch (say, the Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight) with couture, vintage, and sometimes avant-garde clothes and accessories.

For other horological books by women with a broad historical sweep, I recommend Francesca Cartier Brickell’s “The Cartiers”(image 8) or the 1990s bestseller “Longitude”, by Dava Sobel. Both, of course, are available for perusal at the HSNY library.

Rebecca Struthers is the rare female author in our collection who is also a recognized watchmaker, having founded a workshop near Birmingham in 2012. According to her official biography, Struthers is the first watchmaker in Britain to earn a Ph.D. in horology. She lectured at HSNY in 2017.

Struthers’ “Hands of Time: a Watchmaker’s History of Time” goes big: it attempts to tell the complete story of horology from antiquity onwards. According to a review, Struthers’ academic background makes it possible for her to contextualize recent developments and make us see that they’re nothing new, really–watchmakers have been inventing, scheming, and sometimes cheating, all along. Image 9 shows the British and American editions of the book from our library, which are gorgeously illustrated by the author’s husband Craig, who is also a watchmaker.

Struthers also addresses how the gender gap between so-called “men’s” and “women’s” watches originated in the 19th century and widened from there. Currently, the whole idea of gendered watches is the subject of thriving discussion, with different brands taking distinct approaches to the question of whether and how to market watches based on gender. Although it has not historically been a common topic of scholarship, several recent books focus on women’s watches, including “Jewels of Time: the World of Women’s Watches,” by Roberta Naas.

Struthers says in this New York Times interview: “The industry is still incredibly male, white and middle to upper class, and with that we’re losing so much potential talent.” HSNY addresses this imbalance today by offering scholarships to underrepresented groups including female, Jewish and Black watchmaking students. Although women have always been a presence in horology, I hope this article helps shine a light on women’s continued persistence, and how they have their hands in every part of the industry, from the metal to the marketing.

*The Harper’s article has been credited to Faithfull in other sources, but this seems impossible since it was published in 1869 and Faithfull writes that she first visited America in 1872.

**Thanks to Bob Frishman for compiling some of this information in “Horology’s Great Collectors,” a publication associated with the 2022 NAWCC Annual Time Symposium.

Horological Society of New York 11/28/23 Horological Society of New York 11/28/23

Reading Time at HSNY: Put It on My Calendar!

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

Maybe you’ll be watching the time ball drop in Times Square on December 31, waiting for the opening notes of “Auld Lang Syne” to start playing over the kissing, crowds, and confetti. Or maybe you’ll be asleep on the sofa, blissfully unaware of the minutes passing as the year turns passively over into 2024.

Whether or not you’re personally focused on the promise that a new year brings, there’s no denying that it’s a moment when people all over the world are uniquely fixated on the time–when, exactly, does something end and something new begin? How do we define what a year is? In this post I’ll focus on calendars: why they are the way they are, how they’ve captivated and frustrated people for centuries, and how they’ve been represented visually on watches. If you’d like a more in-depth education on the topic, I recommend watching the recording of “The History of the Calendar,” a panel that F.P. Journe led at the Horological Society of New York in 2016.

As long as there have been calendars (at least since ancient Egypt) it seems there have been disagreements over how they should work, and suggestions for their reform. A number of books in our library at HSNY cover the history of calendars, including Michael Judge’s “The Dance of Time: the Origins of the Calendar,” David Ewing Duncan’s “The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens – and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days,” “Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History” by E. G. Richards, and “Marking Time: the Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar,” by Duncan Steel. Incidentally, it seems to me that authors published a rash of these volumes around the turn of the millennium–I wonder why?

One spectacularly illustrated volume in our library is “The Phenomenon Book of Calendars,” originally published in the 1970s. On the back cover, the book boasts: “here, for the first time, all calendar systems past and present have been integrated in one graphically unique publication.” It even comes with a poster (image 1) that features many of these calendars for the years 1978-1979 including, but not limited to: Gregorian, Chinese, Hindu, Hebrew, Islamic, Aztec, Mayan, Roman, Bali, New Guinea, I Ching, and Zodiacal. In our calendar section, we also have books that cover some of these calendars in detail, including “Understanding the Jewish Calendar” and “Une Autre Temps,” which is a French language book about Balinese tika calendars. (A museum note explains how these carved wooden calendars help keep track of festivals and traditions in Bali.)

In James Atkinson’s “Epitome of the Whole Art of Navigation” (1782), a book in our library that I mentioned in my article about longitude, Atkinson covers the workings of the “Gregorian, or New Calendar” (see image 2, which shows the title page). The Gregorian calendar first replaced the earlier Julian calendar in 1582, so it was hardly “new” when this book came out, but Britain didn’t widely adopt the Gregorian system until the mid-18th century. Atkinson’s book went through many editions where information was added as it became useful.

As Atkinson explains, the chief difference between the two calendars was in the calculation of leap years. The Julian calendar includes a leap year every four years–but that was making the year a little too long on average, throwing off the dates of fixed events like the equinoxes. In the Gregorian reform, some of these leap years have been eliminated. Atkinson methodically instructs his readers on how to use the new calendar to calculate religious holidays, the moon age, and the exact time of high tides, which would have been particularly useful to sailors.

In 1793, French revolutionaries created a brand new calendar with decimal dates, as well as a decimal time system. Heavily symbolic, the calendar started a new era with year One in the year of the revolution (1789), though year One was later changed to the year of the founding of the French Republic (1792); the new system was called the French Republican calendar. French reformers devised the timekeeping system in an attempt to eliminate royal and religious influences and set the country on a more “rational” course. Each week had ten days, although there were still twelve months. Each day was also divided into ten hours with each hour lasting 100 minutes.

Ferdinand Berthoud, one of the most prominent and innovative European watchmakers of the 18th century, was a member of the committee that chose the winning proposal for decimal time. Below, a photo of a watch by Ferdinand’s nephew Pierre-Louis (Louis) shows how watchmakers in France adapted to the new scheme (image 3). There are ten hours in the center of the dial and a 100-minute track around the outer edge.

A number of watchmakers even tried to incorporate the new decimal system right alongside the 12-hour system in their designs, resulting in some ingenious, chaotic dial layouts. Image 4 shows an enameled watch dial from 1793-1795, which has both a 10-hour subdial and a 12-hour subdial, as well as a Republican calendar (left) and a Gregorian calendar (right). Both images are from the book “La Révolution Dans la Mesure du Temps,” edited by Catherine Cardinal. The French experiment lasted until around 1806–a turbulent period commemorated in our library by additional titles including “Time and the French Revolution” and “Cadrans de la Révolution.”

A well-known American calendar reform effort in the 20th century was the World Calendar, whose chief champion was Elisabeth Achelis. Achelis, a New Yorker who was heir to a rubber company fortune, became utterly (and somewhat inexplicably) obsessed with the idea of calendar reform after hearing a lecture on the subject in 1929. She adopted the cause as her passion and her life’s work.

You can read more about the World Calendar here, but the general idea is that there are four equal quarters of three months each. So far, so familiar. But this calendar regularizes the length of months (so each quarter has 91 days) and adds two additional off-calendar or intercalary days, Worldsday and Leapyear Day. By these alterations, the New Year begins every year on Sunday, the first of January, and each exact date occurs on the same day of the week, every year. You can see a schematic of the calendar in image 5, with the two intercalary holidays sticking out like page flags at the end of the months of June and December.

In “Of Time and the Calendar,” a 1955 volume in our library (image 6), Achelis claims the World Calendar she proposes would “lower taxes, reduce government costs, help home-budgeting, equalize salary payments” and other benefits. Among other things, paper calendars could be reused indefinitely because the year is the only number on the calendar that would need to be changed. Unfortunately the proposal caused problems for Jews and Christians alike because the intercalary days created two eight-day weeks, which would disturb the observance of the Sabbath.

In addition to writing several books on the subject of the World Calendar, Achelis started the Journal of Calendar Reform to promote the system, and we have a volume of the journal in our library (image 7). The journal’s cover shows another rendering of the world calendar flanked by the words “order,” “balance,” “stability,” and “harmony.” Although the proposal gained some traction with the League of Nations and later the United Nations, it was never widely adopted.

One of the great challenges of watchmaking has been to develop devices to track and display calendar dates that do not need to be frequently reset. Inventors of ingenious modern-day perpetual calendar watches have devised solutions for previously incalculable calendar quandaries. For instance, we have a book about the Vacheron Constantin 57260, which was one of the first watches to feature a Jewish calendar among its 57 (!!!) complications when it debuted in 2015. The Hebrew calendar uses a lunisolar model, meaning both the moon and the sun are taken into account when determining the length of months and years. Other recent complicated models have represented the lunisolar Chinese Traditional Complete calendar, including a 2023 Parmigiani Fleurier watch, and the lunar Hijri calendar that governs Islamic holidays.

Even among simpler timepieces, many watches and clocks feature moon phases, including the longcase clock at our library at HSNY. Image 8 shows the dial of our clock, with the moon waxing and waning contentedly across the top arc, in this photo nearly at full. If you want to build or repair a calendar watch or a clock with a moon phase mechanism, we have books for that, too! One is pictured in image 9.

Whether you’re excited about January 1, or whether it’s just another day to you, I hope you take a moment to think of the calendar as it flips forward, pulling us all along through our worst years and our best, our funerals, festivals, and our very human attempts to make sense of how time touches us.

Horological Society of New York 10/25/23 Horological Society of New York 10/25/23

Reading Time at HSNY: Veteran Watchmakers at the Bulova School

*An assortment of Bulova materials at HSNY’s Jost Bürgi Research Library.*

I promised in my previous article about watchmaking schools to highlight the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, an institution that plays an outsize role in the history of American watchmaking, and also in our archive at the Horological Society of New York. In honor of Veterans Day, I’ve decided to explore the school’s mission, impact on disability rights, and contribution to watchmaking.

Bulova, the company, wasn’t the first to consider watchmaking as a potential career opportunity for veterans. Some veterans thought that watchmaking or watch repair could be a good fit for a variety of reasons: because it made use of their existing skills, because initial training could be completed relatively quickly, because it was an in-demand job, and because it required limited mobility for those who had been injured during their service.

In 1921 the “Horological Journal,” a British watchmaking magazine published by the British Horological Institute (BHI), which we have in our collection, printed an article called “Training our Disabled in Watch and Clock Repairing.” The article reports on the efforts of the BHI to recruit and train veterans who had been injured in the First World War. The Institute “was quick to realise the advantages offered by the watch and clock repairing industry to disabled men who were left with the free use of their arms and hands.”

Like other professional organizations, the BHI saw that training could benefit both veterans (who largely preferred to support themselves through paid work rather than relying on pensions) and employers (who were short of trained watchmakers after the war killed many young men). The article counts over 1,000 men in training in the United Kingdom by 1921.

In 1945, in the immediate aftermath of another devastating war, the Bulova Watch Company Foundation increased accessibility for watchmaking students in the United States through the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, which trained disabled veterans for a new career. Arde Bulova, son of company founder Joseph, established the school in 1945 with seven students enrolled. His mission was “to serve those who served us” with a tuition-free education. (Image 1 shows a drawing of the school above this motto.) At the time, business was booming for Bulova. An American company founded in 1875, Bulova made use of celebrities and the new technologies of television and radio to advertise its watches, especially the Accutron tuning fork watch.

Education and recruitment for veterans began even before they entered the Bulova School’s doors. According to a pamphlet from the 1950s, the Veterans Administration (VA) invited Bulova to establish training programs inside hospitals like Walter Reed, so veterans could start learning even before they were released.

With company money, Bulova built a specially designed school in Woodside, Queens. In a 1950s promotional pamphlet in our collection (image 2), pictures of the school show how the building was designed to prioritize wheelchair accessibility: “There is an elevator with doors at opposite sides, so that a man need not turn his wheel chair around to get out. Entrance doors open by an electric eye. Ramps instead of thresholds at all rooms…Floors of cork to prevent skidding.” There was also a fully outfitted rehabilitation facility on campus with an on-staff physical therapist, and after 1965, a fully accessible heated swimming pool.

Interestingly, this pamphlet, which was produced in collaboration with the VA, calls the training program implemented at the school the “Bulova Plan,” a “pattern for American Industry.” It recommends the Bulova Plan to “any producer of light and durable goods,” not just to other watch companies. Its final page even includes contact information for a specific VA employee who can offer advice on how to train disabled veterans for different industrial jobs.

Not only does this brochure promote Bulova, it forcefully advocates for the employment of rehabilitated veterans in general, who “have the stuff to stick to difficult jobs.” Bulova deliberately worked to make hiring disabled veterans easy for employers, so that they would recognize it as a business opportunity, rather than a charitable obligation. Veterans are not to be pitied or sentimentalized, the pamphlet insists–they should be rightly appreciated for their skills and value in the workplace.

Bulova’s school had always been open to those who were not disabled veterans, but disabled veterans were given priority, and for the first few years they filled all the spots. In 1950 the school began to accept disabled civilians and eventually, non-disabled students.

A 1951 press release in our collection describes a visit by U.S. Vice President Alben W. Barkley (who served under President Truman) on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the graduation of Bulova’s first class of 20 veterans (image 3). In an accompanying image, students work at rows of tables in a huge room that could accommodate 125 learners (image 4). Some students can be seen using wheelchairs to navigate the space; each bench could be adapted to the student's specific physical needs. An undated video of the school also shows other accommodations, for instance, a student holding a movement with a prosthesis while working on it with his left hand.

Another photo from the interior of the school (image 5) shows an inspirational mural depicting famous watchmaking moments throughout history, like the invention of the marine chronometer. The mural connects students with the longer, illustrious history of horology, helping them see themselves as part of a broader story.

Students studied using the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking Training Manual, a text that became a standard and was reprinted in 13 editions through 2003. We have the manual in our library at HSNY, and it illustrates and explains the entire course, from Unit One, “staking balance staff,” to Unit 11, “finishing.” Of course, the training includes both schematics and photographs to help with common tasks like stem making, mainspring barrel assembly, friction jeweling, and escapement repair. Our copy even includes handwritten notes by an anonymous student (image 6).

Many American retail jewelers publicly pledged to hire graduates of the Bulova School. In fact, more jobs were promised (1,400, according to one publication) than graduates were available. This meant graduates could be reliably guaranteed a position. In addition, they had the use of a “model store” inside the school to learn sales techniques and other commercial skills before embarking on their careers.

In addition to its primary focus, the Bulova School was also a sports powerhouse. By 1950 the school had already assembled a wheelchair basketball team called the “Bulova Watchmakers” who competed around the country (image 7). Students at the school had access to other sports including archery, table tennis, pool, and volleyball.

two pages from a brochure showing students participating in wheelchair sports and relaxing. — *Image 7*

In our library, we have photographs of Bulova alumni reunions and basketball games into the 1960s. Bulova co-sponsored the National Wheelchair Games along with the Paralyzed Veterans of America starting in 1957. Images 8 and 9 show the annual awards dinner of the Wheelchair Games in 1959 and 1961. Signs at the tables show some of the creative names for the teams: the Brooklyn Whirlaways, Pan-Am Jets, and Cleveland Comets.

Banquet scene with some diners in wheelchairs, 1959. — *Image 8*

Banquet scene with some diners in wheelchairs, 1961. — *Image 9*

Facing declining enrollment at the end of the century, like other watchmaking schools, the Bulova School closed in the 1990s. However, the mission didn’t end there: Bulova’s initiative continues today as the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative (VWI), which offers free horological education to disabled veterans at its center in Delaware. (A video produced by Bulova, a founding sponsor of the VWI, shows some of the work that VWI is doing.) HSNY has awarded over $30,000 to the VWI over the last four years through our Howard Robbins Award, and has also awarded several individual scholarships to VWI students. All of HSNY’s classes are offered at no cost to veterans.

As for the Bulova School building, it still stands in Queens. Disability rights activists used the building for meetings when they were working to remove physical barriers to public access in New York City–because it was one of the city’s most accessible existing locations prior to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It is currently owned by the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Painted portrait of Joseph Bulova, an olde man with gray hair wearing glasses and a watch. — *Image 10*

While I’ve concentrated on the Bulova School in this article, HSNY’s library holds a rich history of the company as a whole, including books (especially about the Accutron), service manuals, parts catalogs, and even issues of the “Watch Repair Digest,” a quarterly periodical published by the Bulova material sales division that offered advice and entertainment for the watchmaker. Digitized issues of HSNY’s newsletter, “The Horologist’s Loupe,” chronicle HSNY visits to Bulova’s factory in Queens and to the Bulova School in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1969, members enjoyed a tour of the campus as well as “a movie…featuring the Wheelchair basket ball team [sic].” A large portrait of Joseph Bulova even presides over our classroom space, offering kind encouragement to our students (image 10).

It would be fair to say that Bulova, and the Bulova School, contributed to a New York watchmaking community that is more accessible, more inclusive, and stronger than it would have otherwise been.

Horological Society of New York 9/21/23 Horological Society of New York 9/21/23

Reading Time at HSNY: The Witching Hour

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

*Image 1: “Le repas des singes” (“The Monkeys’ Meal”) pictured in Les Automates by Jean Prasteau (1968.)*

“Death is the ultimate complication,” declares Watanabe, the provocateur artist and inventor of the Cassius Seven, the titular “Death Watch” of Stona Fitch’s new novel. At its launch, the wristwatch’s features sound like any other that would be covered in dutiful detail by a journalist: “full-jeweled movement, titanium case, sapphire bezel.” There’s just one tiny addition: seven spinning knives that might emerge from the case to kill the wearer in an instant by severing his wrist. Oh yeah, and once you put it on, you can’t take it off.

Is it an ironic publicity stunt, a fake-out meant to embarrass the billionaire watch collectors of the world with a send-up of their irresponsible, nihilistic wealth? A postmodern joke built to raise questions about our “precarious existence” as mortal humans, which could indeed end at any moment? Or, as its inventor claims, does this watch really know the answer to the question “When will you die?” The characters in this book aren’t too sure, but they’re about to find out.

If you’re a regular consumer of watch content, you’ll enjoy the industry parody in “Death Watch,” available to peruse in our library at the Horological Society of New York (image 2 shows the book alongside some of the non-deadly watches in our current exhibit.) This deadly watch, while fictional, raises the specter of the real-life watches that have killed or maimed.

One of the most obvious classes of deadly watches is the radium dial watch. Of course, you aren’t going to die from wearing a lumed watch today, even if it’s radioactive – but people did die, or were horribly sickened, in the process of creating them.

The Radium Girls were workers at American watch factories who ingested poisonous radium paint. At work, they used their saliva to “point” the brushes, creating a fine tip to paint glowing details on dials and hands. Eventually, the radium paint caused their jaws to disintegrate, as well as other health effects, and was ultimately fatal for many.

The Radium Girls later inspired a slew of books, plays, songs, and movies, as well as a labor rights movement that helped protect future generations of workers. Here at the library, we have a few versions of their story in print, including Kate Moore’s “The Radium Girls.”

In a new graphic novel also called “Radium Girls,” which HSNY owns in French and English, artist Cy illustrates these “ghost girls” whose clothes and bodies would glow after their shifts, covered in fine radium dust. He focuses on real workers at the U.S. Radium Corporation in New Jersey in the 1920s, including Grace Fryer, whose bravery is recognized by a scholarship at HSNY (image 3). If you turn out the lights, surprise! The ghoulish glow of the book’s front cover makes the radium effect threateningly tangible (images 4 & 5).

While the effects of radium are horrifying and sad, further down on the “just creepy” portion of the scary spectrum are humanoid automata. Books in our library cover automata in detail, since, like watches, they run on mechanical clockwork. Many people find them unsettling, with their too-wide smiles and their whirring indifference to the frailty of human flesh.

Some automata are merely visually upsetting–a particular “monkey harpist” in the museum catalog “Musical Machines and Living Dolls” will haunt my dreams until I expire. Images 6 and 7 show partially disassembled human and dog figures from the book “Les Automates” by Jean Prasteau, which will probably not emerge from the computer to murder you. Other automata are unsettling for more complicated, cerebral reasons: the workshop of Pierre Jacquet-Droz, an 18th-century watchmaker known for his singing songbirds, produced automata that were capable of drawing, playing music, and writing reprogrammable sentences, and could be called early computers. (You can still see them in action today at the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History in Switzerland.) These automata, sometimes referred to as robots or androids, blur the line between human and machine, falling into the “uncanny valley” where they inspire fear and revulsion–in scientific terms, they give us the ick.

Of course human fears about almost-humans have accelerated in light of the current artificial intelligence arms race, but these worries have been around for centuries. In the 1899 story “Moxon’s Master,” for instance, a fictional chess-playing automaton, inspired by real-life examples, kills its creator after losing to him. Recently, a real chess-playing robot made headlines when it broke a little boy’s finger during a match in Moscow. The president of the Moscow Chess Federation was quoted as saying: “The robot broke the child’s finger — this, of course, is bad.” The robots are coming for us. Bad indeed.

Ending my article on the least scary end of the horror-logical spectrum, I wanted to include a few images from a new acquisition at HSNY’s ever-growing library. “Five O’Clock Tea” is a French-language Omega advertising pamphlet from 1912 whose narrative can only be described as “trippy” (see image 8). The story, by Jean Richepin, calls itself a “modern fairy tale,” and is chock-full of goblins, fairies, and gnomes. A young girl, Didi, is suffering from a mysterious fever, which can only be cured by a visit to fairyland where she will meet magic creatures.

The doctor instructs Didi to breathe in a “magic smoke” composed mainly of opium poppies and hashish (really). Didi begins to see the creatures of fairyland dancing in front of her. The doctor explains: “Because we enjoy all our progress here [in the real world]… Steam, electricity, mechanics, have their elves, their fairies, their gnomes…there has recently been a brand new gnome among the fairies…who tells them the exact time.”

In image 9, by artist Maurice Lalavi, a gnome with the body of an Omega watch appears in the sky over the ecstatic Didi, who exclaims “The new gnome of exact time, I see it!” This “gnome” has a heart that beats 18,000 times per hour, or 300 times a minute, a “metal heart, his escapement heart, his magical heart, made of wheels and springs which split time and create it by splitting it.” This advertising copy is carefully written for accuracy; an Omega watch-heart of 1912 could beat at 18,0000 vibrations per hour or 2.5 hertz, on the low end of the modern watch frequency spectrum.

The pamphlet closes with an image of the enormous Omega factory, subtitled by a production claim of 900 to 1000 watches per day (image 11). To tie in with the story, the publication also features full-color illustrations of the latest models (you can see an early wristwatch with a bracelet in image 10). Omega customers could have picked up this pamphlet at French department store Kirby, Beard & Co., a major Omega retailer at the time.

Although this is not a work intended for children, it may be designed to appeal to adults craving a little connection to the fairyland of fantasy. The subject couldn’t be more practical–watches designed for precision–but the treatment couldn’t be more whimsical. Watches are part of the world of magic, the story suggests, amalgams of artistry and engineering that seem almost supernatural. But watches are just things, really–things that can inspire your daydreams or stalk your nightmares, make you smile or sweat, leave you feeling treated or tricked.