As much as you might expect some passive-aggressive snark judging from the title, I am not at all implying that our readers never make interesting observations. As much as all of us here at HODINKEE never start looking through the comments without just a little trepidation, we also find them to be a great source of often useful feedback from readers, and also a great source of information. One of the nice things about watches is that it’s such a huge field that whatever subject we happen to be covering, chances are there is someone out there who specializes in it. And, of course, you, our readers, make interesting philosophical observations from time to time too.
In this case it was in the comments on a quick news story we ran on the fact that Richard Mille, despite the general industry downturn, seems to be continuing to do rather well (Richard Mille being a company perhaps likelier than others to encourage philosophical observations). The comment was by user Josh, who observed, in amongst several other remarks on who is and isn’t interested in horology, that, “I am gonna say that many of these places have people in their 20s interested in WATCHES but not horology. I know many people interested in the prestige that a pricey watch conveys, but nothing about the pieces contained therein, which comprises the ‘horology’ interest.”
Now for all the years I’ve been inflicting my views on watches and watchmaking on people, I don’t think I ever really formulated the question of horology to myself in exactly that way, but I think Josh is onto something. There are really two things this brings up: the first is that there is, in fact, a difference between being interested in watches and being interested in horology; the second thing it brings up is that there are a lot of different ways in which you can be interested in watches, and watches vs. horology is just the beginning.
Horology, in terms of understanding how a watch works, can be a pretty heavy lift. A simple watch isn’t a complicated machine, but aside from situations like working on your own car or bicycle (which not many people do) we don’t have much direct interaction with machines these days. Moreover, watches don’t work like other machines with which we might be more familiar. On top of that, if you want to understand how complicated watches work – calendars, high-precision moonphase displays, chronographs, and the really challenging stuff like sonneries and repeaters, and so on – it can get really hairy. The display aspect of an interest in watches, an engagement with the aesthetics or the social status side of it, is undoubtedly less taxing.
This is not to say that being mainly engaged with the exterior – dial, case, hands, and so on – is wrong; not everyone is interested in mechanics, or the applied physics problems that the technical evolution of watchmaking involves. It’s just a different thing. What does help, though, is having a sense of what you know, and what you don’t know – one of the nice things about working at HODINKEE is that we all benefit from a chance to interact every day with people who are interested in watchmaking on different levels.
It never hurts to bear in mind that watchmaking is around 500 years old, that clocks are significantly older, and that sophisticated mechanics relevant to timekeeping much, much older than that (the Greeks had the tech necessary to make a very complicated mechanical astronomical calendar over 2,000 years ago, which we know about now, mostly through sheer luck). A comprehensive understanding is impossible for any one person.
If you really want to have the kind of context necessary to understand watchmaking technically, culturally, and aesthetically, here’s a wish list of subjects to understand. You’ll want to have a reasonable grasp of mechanics; you need to understand the basics of what an escapement does, and how the most important ones work; having a grasp of basic classical physics is a big help and if you want to understand things like quartz timekeeping, GPS, and atomic clocks, knowing something about special and general relativity and even quantum mechanics doesn’t hurt either.
A smattering of chemistry and metallurgy would be great; a solid reading knowledge of English, French, German, and Italian would be a huge asset. Knowing something about celestial navigation is terrific; a grasp of fine arts history and design history is super; having an understanding of decorative arts like engraving, gem cutting and setting, engine-turning, and enameling is indispensable. It’s really useful to understand the contexts in which traditionally, watches have been used – general civilian and military aviation; naval history; manned space flight; yachting; and of course the automotive world (an incomplete list but it will do to start with).
Probably you should know how a watch actually works; probably you should also understand how, and why, magnetism and temperature changes and alterations in position can affect rate stability (and, of course, you’ll need to know the difference between accuracy and rate stability). This sets you up to understand things like the remontoire d’égalité and the fusée, but you’ll need a grasp of basic acoustics to understand repeaters; and of astronomy and orbital dynamics to understand the perpetual calendar and the equation of time. (You probably don’t need to understand more arcane stuff like lunisolar cycles although, god bless Vacheron Constantin, the subject does come up from time to time). And then, of course, you probably ought to know as much as possible about the history of watches and watchmaking, from the earliest, balance-spring-less one-hand portable clocks, down to today’s bewilderingly varied horological landscape.
Watch writers like to talk about how so many of our non-watch loving friends wonder how we can spend our lives writing about watches, but the answer is that while the subject may seem narrow, it’s really very deep and you can come at it from so many different directions, you never run out of things to write about, or stop learning. So yeah, there’s a difference between being into watches for the cosmetics (and I don’t mean that as a put-down) and being interested in horology, but watches are such a vast subject that you’ll never want for something new to get into. And thank God, or places like HODINKEE wouldn’t be here. Best wishes to our readers for the New Year and keep the comments coming!
Watches shown in the story:
Top image, an amazing early 20th ultra thin repeater by Jaeger-LeCoultre
The Richard Mille RM 67-01 Ultra Thin
The A. Lange & Söhne Grand Complication
The 36mm yellow gold Rolex Day-Date
The Longines Lindbergh Hour-Angle navigation watch
A pocket watch by Girard Perregaux under three platinum bridges, 1890
Wristwatch News, Reviews, & Original Stories — HODINKEE
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