Did you say journey

So the world you know is one in which the Swiss are the ultimate purveyors of efficiency and luxury and Henry Ford invented mass production. But watchmaking was primarily French, which was cribbed by the British, who had a vast empire of far-flung impoverished colonies with no voting rights that labored under preposterous imperial mandates preventing local industries from competing with England.

So while Christchurch became renowned for making fusee chains (which is a workhouse horror the likes of which still blow my mind), the highly-renowned clocks of America were not permitted to be sold abroad. This, more than anything, is what led to the eventual collapse of the British Empire: by the 1750s, the Americas were something like a quarter the population of the Empire but fully fifty percent of its gross product. More than that, the lack of cheap labor in America had led to the invention of mechanization.

While the majority of British production was piecework in workhouses, Americans mechanized around factories. There was no piecework in making rifles. There was soon no piecework in making clocks. And by 1830, piecework in watchmaking was about to be over.

Americans went so hard into standardization and mechanization that no other country could compete. The British and French leaned heavily into parlor automata because they were still something that rich people bought one-off; watches and clocks, on the other hand, were largely an American affair. The British being British, of course, and the French being French, they turned to cheap labor markets abroad, namely Switzerland. Which was not at the time an ennobled bastion of chocolate drinkers but a hardscrabble frontier of Alpenvolk who still made hands in this cottage, mainsprings in that cottage, crown wheels down the street, etc.

The Alpenvolk took advantage of the Philadelphia World's Fair in 1876 to send spies to figure out how the hell the Americans were doing it; they despaired because not only were the Americans happy to show them around, but that any watch off the pile ran better than anything the Swiss could make, and they were running between 10-15% yield without rework. Henry Ford, in fact, got his start as a watchmaker and pretty much blames Waltham for the existence of the Ford Motor Company:

In his biography "My Life and 'Work", Henry Ford recites some of his early experiences..." At one period of those early days I think that I must have had fully three hundred watches. I thought that I could build a serviceable watch for around thirty cents and nearly stalled in the business. But I did not because I figured out that watches were not universal necessities, and therefore, people generally would not buy them. Just how I reached that surprising conclusion, I am unable to state. I did not like the ordinary jewelry and watchmaking work excepting where the job was hard to do. Even then, I wanted to make something in quantity.

It was just about the time when the standard railroad time was being arranged. We had formerly been on sun time and for quite a while, just as in our present daylight-saving days, the railroad time differed from the local time. That bothered me a great deal and so I succeeded in making a watch that kept both times. It had two dials and it was quite a curiosity in the neighborhood."

The Alpenvolk, upon seeing the glory that is American manufacturing, immediately set about to duplicate the extreme precision and economy created by factory work.

NOT

Naaah the Alpenvolk continued to use weird-ass fucking units 100 years after the invention of the Metric system because they're goddamn teutonic hillbillies. At one point another Waltham engineer decided maybe he could make a little money by going to Switzerland and teaching the savages how to actually make something that isn't a piece of shit and the hillbillies reacted so kindly that they threatened to murder him if he set up anywhere they could find him which is why IWC is the only major watchmaker in German-speaking Switzerland. It is also, notably, the only Swiss company judged competent enough to make pilot watches by the Nazis.

Switzerland had a reputation for making absolute fucking garbage pretty much up until the Japanese became the free world's whipping boy. You see all these fancy-ass Patek Philippe movements and shit in old Cartier watches but that's kind of like saying "Quartz" on the dial; they weren't considered particularly impressive at the time. What's funny is you'll see these gawdawful "marriage watches" on eBay where some dead watchmaker's drawer of old movements has been raided and someone will throw an Audemars movement in a modern case and charge $4k and they'll get it? Because people don't know that Audemars Piguet circa 1910 was heaping garbage. They had all sorts of homeopathic adaptations to watch parts that make no mechanical sense but since the hill tribe one valley over thought it was smart, why bother going to college.

But they were (and are) a tax haven, so Rolex moved there for tax purposes (and get really pissy about Swiss neutrality during WWII - read this story it's fuckin' awesome). And they were (and are) neutral so while all of American chronometry got switched over to bomb timers, nautical clocks, fuses and other weapons of war during first WWI and then WWII, the Swiss just kept on keeping on making their bullshit, and then by the time WWII was over there was no domestic American watch industry and there was a lot of pent up demand and with Japan now being the world's garbage hole, Swiss watches were no longer crap, they were imported luxury items and although it took them 100 years, and although they still speak in ligne, they finally looked over ol' Florence Ariosto Jones' shoulder and said "huh... mechanization."

And that's why nobody appreciates American pocket watches and everyone thinks the Swiss are geniuses.

SIDE NOTE: Americans weren't the mechanized monsters everyone pretends. The general approach was that you make a watch movement as interchangeable and reliable as you can, and then you hire a jeweler to make you a case which is going to be beautiful and you'll love it and won't it be glorious. Most automakers took this same approach: you had your manufacturer, who made the engine, the transmission, the frame and the running gear, and then you hired a coachbuilder to make it look cool. Henry Ford? He's the reason we can't have nice things. There would be one body, it would come in one color, fuck you. HOWEVER

It meant that American watchmakers had a powerful incentive to make things the same, make a lot of spare parts, and keep scrupulous records as to how shit goes together. Which is why even now, probably 150 years after it was made, you can unscre the back of that watch, look up a number and enter it here and get not only the year and maybe month of manufacture, but probably an exploded view, a listing of all parts, a cross-reference of parts interchangeability, and maybe even an eBay link to buy that shit new-old-stock. Because a thousand spare Model T engines? Takes up a warehouse. But a thousand spare Waltham mainstems? fits in a pill bottle.