Out & About Summer 2019

T he word watch is from the Old English ‘waecce’ meaning watchfulness. It is believed that this then defined the watch as we know it in reference to the watchmen using timepieces to keep a track of their movements while on duty.

Antique examples tend to have the hinge at the nine o’clock position, whereas more modern examples have the hinge at the six o’clock position.

During the 19th Century the improvement in the efficiency of the rail road system in America for both industry trade and travel led to an increase in its popularity and demand, which in turn paved the way for a huge increase in demand and use of pocket watches to ensure the system worked to its full potential.

Watches have come a long way from the portable sprung-driven examples of the 15th century. The main spring and balance wheel has been replaced by the quartz movement. The cheaper, mass-produced quartz movement will always be the most popular example, however, the workmanship and prestige of the mechanical movement will always be at the higher end of the watch market.

Left to right a full hunter, half hunter and an open faced pocket watch

A poignant example of vastly important and significant accurate timekeeping in this industry was in April 1891 when an engineer’s watch stopped for four minutes, which led to an infamous train wreck on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway in Kipton, Ohio. As a result of this preventable accident, there was a need to improve the standards across the board and have more reliable timepieces to ensure such incidents did not happen again. Webb C Bell was appointed Chief Time Inspector and from 1893 the General Railroad Timepiece Standards were implemented. These standards stated that timepieces had to be: “...open-faced, size 16 or 18, have a minimum of 17 jewels, adjusted to at least five positions, keep time accurately to within 30 seconds a week, adjusted to temps of 34 °F (1 °C) to 100 °F (38 °C), have a double roller, steel escape wheel, lever set, regulator, winding stem at 12 o’clock, and have bold black Arabic numerals on a white dial, with black hands”. As technology developed and improved and fashions and styles changed, the pocket watch followed suit. The com- mon issue with pocket watch movements being damaged and broken by being dropped and knocked resulting in the pivots and jewels supporting the watch balance shift- ing and breaking needed to be addressed. The Incabloc system, invented in 1934 by Swiss engineers Georges Braunschweig and Fritz Marti used a lyre-shaped spring to effectively act as a shock absorber to allow the bearings to shift under impact. Thus, the fragile staff does not bear the brunt of the impact and the springs are able to guide the parts back to their original positions.

Verge pocket watches, the earliest type of mechanical escapement, were in popular use from the 14th until the mid-19th-century. It was developed to enable the control of the rate of ticking by use of gears, thus making timekeeping more accurate. The invention of this important movement paved the way for the development of all mechanical clocks by allowing the continuous process of measuring time. The fusee movement, a cone-shaped pulley with a groove around it having a string attached to the mainspring barrel, is believed to have been invented by the clockmaker Jacob Zech of Prague circa 1525 – it was an adaptation of the spring movement already commonly in use. It was very effective in keeping time as the string or chord balanced the uneven pull of the mainspring as it ran down. The notorious British amateur motor racing driver, engineer and industrialist Sir Gawaine George Hope Baillie famously said of the fusee that ‘perhaps no problem in mechanics has ever been solved so simply and so perfectly’. Pocket watches were often seen as a status symbol. The ‘hunter’, a full case to enclose the watch earned it’s name from being used by huntsman who could easily access the watch to reveal the time while holding their hunter horse’s reins in the other hand. And their precious watch was also protected from any potential falling debris, dust, rain and tumbles off a horse. A half hunter has a case to the reverse, to protect the movement and half a window section within the case to the face side to enable the time to be read without having to open the case. As a result, often the cases are marked to the front exterior to enable the easier reading of the time.

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O&A SUMMER 2019