When I walk home from the office, I pass two small shops. Inside each, a watchmaker is hunched over his desk, the space dimly lit. Their hands deftly

The One Percent Rule

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2024-11-25 16:00:09

When I walk home from the office, I pass two small shops. Inside each, a watchmaker is hunched over his desk, the space dimly lit. Their hands deftly maneuver gears no larger than a baby's small fingernail. In my own work, I spend my days immersed in the glowing screens and complex algorithms of artificial intelligence. It's a world of constant change and intangible outputs, a stark contrast to the tangible mechanisms of these watchmakers. But there's something deeper here, something about the intricacy, the precision, the dogged determination of these watchmakers that has shaped our world in more profound ways than we might realize.

Why did so many revolutionary inventors start as watchmakers? What is it about ticking clocks and fine-tuned mechanisms that propelled some of the greatest leaps in industrial progress?

We know James Watt for the steam engine, and perhaps we have heard the tale of the tea kettle that inspired him. Yet, what we often overlook is that Watt was trained as a watchmaker. The precise calibration required to repair the timepieces of Glasgow University led him to consider efficiency, to ponder how energy might be used, or wasted,in a system. When Watt set eyes on a model of a Newcomen engine, it wasn’t a grand flash of genius that led him to innovate, it was his methodical watchmaker’s eye, his penchant for small improvements that cumulate into revolutions. The separate condenser, which made his steam engine so much more effective, was an idea born out of a watchmaker’s obsession with removing inefficiencies.