On the Beauty and Art of Making a Watch
When I first started training as a watchmaker at nineteen, I was taught never to leave a trace of my presence within the watches I restored. And yet, these traces can tell us all kinds of stories about otherwise inanimate objects. For example, the vintage Omega Seamaster wristwatch on my workbench was repaired by a man called Jeff on 10 March 1971. I know this because Jeff scratched his name and the service date into the back of the dial, so that if the watch ever came back to him, he would know that he had previously worked on it and when.
Working as we do on objects only a few centimeters in diameter, a watchmaker’s world is often not much bigger than a thumbnail. It is all-consuming. Sometimes a whole morning passes and I have barely shifted my gaze beyond the postage-stamp-sized mechanism I am working on. I suddenly realize the coffee next to me is cold and my eyes are dry from concentrating so hard I’ve forgotten to blink.
My husband, Craig, is also a watchmaker and, although we work on benches that face each other, we can spend whole days in near silence, exchanging little conversation beyond orders for the kettle. When we make a new watch, whether from salvaged parts or from scratch, it can take us anywhere from six months to six years. We can measure sections of our lives by these watches, and sometimes find ourselves noticeably older when we are finished with them.
