Put a watch together

Four minutes

The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern was the railway that ran along the bottom of Lake Erie between Buffalo and Chicago, through Cleveland and Toledo. Much of it was a single track, so trains going opposite ways shared the same rails and took turns. A slower train would pull into a siding at a station and wait for the faster one to go by. That only works if everyone agrees what time it is.

On Sunday 19 April 1891 the fast mail train, No. 14, was running east towards Cleveland. The Toledo Express was running west out of Elyria with passengers. The express was supposed to wait at Kipton, a small station west of Oberlin, and let the mail train through. Its conductor looked at his watch and believed there was time to make Kipton before the mail train did. His watch had stopped for four minutes at some point that morning and then started again, so he was four minutes behind the world. The two trains met at the Kipton depot. Nine people died, among them both engineers and six postal clerks who had been sorting letters in the mail car.

Why a jeweller

In 1891, if you wanted to know whether a watch was any good, you asked a jeweller, because jewellers were the people who sold watches and mended them. Cleveland's was Webb Ball. He had grown up on a farm in Knox County, Ohio, come to the city in 1879, bought into a shop called Whitcomb and Metten, and within two years put his own name over the door. In 1883, the year the railways adopted standard time, he became the first jeweller in Cleveland to take the noon signal by telegraph from the Naval Observatory in Washington and set his shop clock by it. From then on, if you wanted the right time in Cleveland, you looked in Ball's window. So when the railway wanted somebody to look at every watch its men carried, it went to him.

Ball went through 2,300 of them. Then he wrote the rule, and what it meant for a man who ran a train was this. Every two weeks he took his watch to an inspector Ball had approved, usually a jeweller in a railway town. The inspector compared it with standard time and wrote the reading on a card kept for that one watch. If it had drifted more than thirty seconds since the last card, it went away for repair, and the man was lent another, because he was not allowed to run a train with a watch that hadn't passed. Thirty seconds in two weeks is about two seconds a day.

Ball didn't leave the men to find watches that could do that on their own, because the rule also said what had to be inside one. It needed a lever escapement rather than the cheaper kind. It needed at least seventeen jewels doing real work as bearings. And its balance had to be adjusted so the watch ran at the same rate warm or cold, flat or standing on any of its four edges. By the time he died in 1922, three quarters of the railways in the United States were running on his inspection service, 125,000 miles of track, and so were lines in Canada and Mexico.

The cheaper kind of watch was everywhere by then. A factory at Waltham, Massachusetts had spent the 1850s learning to cut watch parts by machine so that any part fitted any watch, and by 1880 ten American companies were making nearly three million watches a year. In 1896 Robert Ingersoll began selling one for a dollar, and over the next twenty years he sold forty million of them. A dollar watch kept good enough time for a farmer. Ball's point was that it did not keep good enough time for a man with two hundred passengers behind him.

There is a word game on this site, if you would rather do that than read about trains. Long Story Short. One sentence a day, and you keep five of its words.

Every part had a name on it

None of what Ball asked for was new. Every part on his list had been invented over the previous two centuries, usually by someone trying to solve a different problem. The first watches came out of Nuremberg around 1505, when a locksmith, usually said to be Peter Henlein, replaced the falling weight of a tower clock with a coiled spring so the clock could be carried. For the next 170 years a watch kept time to within an hour or two a day. That was about as good as a sundial and a great deal more expensive.

The part that changed that was the hairspring. It is a coil of steel finer than a hair, fixed to the balance wheel, and it makes the wheel swing back and forth at a rate set by the spring rather than by however hard the mainspring is pushing. Christiaan Huygens in The Hague and Robert Hooke in London each claimed it in 1675, and they spent the rest of their lives arguing about it. Whoever was right, the error dropped from hours a day to about ten minutes. Every mechanical watch built since is that spring with better metal round it.

The next push came from ships. A captain who knew the exact time back in port could work out how far east or west he had sailed, so in 1714 Parliament offered £20,000 to anyone who could keep that time to within thirty miles of position. A carpenter called John Harrison spent most of his life on it. In 1761 his fourth attempt, a watch five inches across, sailed to Jamaica and lost five seconds in 81 days. That put the ship within two miles, and it is a better rate than Ball would ask of a railroad watch 130 years later.

Then there was the position problem. A watch runs slightly differently on its side than on its back, because gravity pulls the swinging balance one way and then another. Abraham-Louis Breguet in Paris gave that its most elaborate answer on 26 June 1801, when he patented a cage that carries the whole escapement round once a minute so that gravity pulls on it equally from every side. He called it a tourbillon. It is beautiful, it is expensive, and on a wrist that moves about all day it does almost nothing. Ball's answer was cheaper. You adjust the balance until it runs the same in five positions, and that is what a watchmaker still does.

So that is the list, with a name and a date on every line. A spring from Nuremberg. A hairspring from Huygens and Hooke. A lever escapement from Thomas Mudge in London in the 1750s. Jewel bearings from a Swiss mathematician called Fatio de Duillier in 1702. And a balance adjusted in five positions, because a jeweller in Cleveland had nine funerals to think about. An inspector on Ball's line checked for all of it by opening the back of the watch and looking. You are about to do the same thing the other way round, and put one together in the order a watchmaker does.

Why it's ever wrong

Three things push a watch off Ball's two seconds a day. The first is heat. Steel goes soft as it warms, so the hairspring loses a little stiffness, and the watch runs slow in a warm pocket and fast on a cold bedside table. A Swiss physicist called Charles-Édouard Guillaume solved that with nickel alloys that don't change with temperature, and he was given the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physics for it. The second is position, which you have met already. The third is magnetism. A phone gives off about 80 gauss, a watch only has to survive 60, and a magnetised hairspring sticks to itself and runs fast.

Once a watchmaker has adjusted for all of that, a certified Swiss chronometer keeps within minus four and plus six seconds a day. Rolex guarantees its own to two. A cheap automatic is allowed forty. After that the only thing keeping any of them honest is a service every five to ten years, when somebody takes the whole mechanism apart, cleans it, oils about fifty points and puts it back together.

The rotor you placed at step eleven is the one part Ball's engineers never had. Abraham-Louis Perrelet tried the idea in a pocket watch in 1777 and found that a pocket doesn't move enough to be useful. A wrist does. In 1923 a watch repairer from Bolton called John Harwood put a swinging weight into a wristwatch, sold thirty thousand of them, and went bankrupt anyway. In 1931 Rolex let the weight turn all the way round instead of bumping between two springs, and that design is inside almost every automatic watch made since.

If eighteen parts was enough for one sitting, today's Long Story Short takes about two minutes and has no parts at all.

Lace on his lingerie

Everything above was built to sit in a pocket on a chain. For a long time that was the only respectable place for it, because a watch on the wrist was a bracelet, and a bracelet was for women. Breguet made one for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, in 1810. Patek Philippe made one for a Hungarian countess in 1868. Cartier made one for the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont in 1904, after he complained that he couldn't reach his pocket watch while flying. None of that moved the average man, and in May 1914 the Albuquerque Journal could still write that a fellow who wears a wrist-watch "is frequently suspected of having lace on his lingerie, and of braiding his hair at night."

Three years after that article, the British War Department was issuing wristwatches to officers. A man timing an artillery barrage cannot dig a pocket watch out of a greatcoat. The men who came home from the trenches kept wearing them, and by 1930 wristwatches outsold pocket watches fifty to one. Nobody mentioned lingerie again.

The numbers on those trench dials glowed, and the glow was radium. From 1917 the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, and later a company in Ottawa, Illinois, employed about four thousand young women to paint it onto dials and hands. The supervisors told them to point the brush between their lips, because a rag or a rinse wasted paint. By 1927 more than fifty of the women at the New Jersey plant were dead, of anaemia, of jaws that crumbled, of cancers nobody had a name for yet. Five of the survivors sued and settled in 1928 for $10,000 each and $600 a year. None of the five lived to see the 1940s. Radium came off watch dials in the 1960s. The paint on a modern dial is a strontium compound invented in Japan in 1993, and it needs a lamp to charge it.

Christmas Day, 1969

The first thing to keep time on a wrist without a balance wheel was a tuning fork, not quartz. Bulova's Accutron went on sale in 1960 with a battery driving a fork that hummed 360 times a second. It didn't tick. If you held it to your ear it sang, faintly. It was guaranteed to a minute a month, which was better than most mechanical watches of the day and worse than what came nine years later.

Seiko put the first quartz wristwatch on sale in Tokyo on 25 December 1969. It cost 450,000 yen, which was roughly the price of a Toyota Corolla that year, and about a hundred were made. Inside, a battery made a sliver of quartz vibrate 32,768 times a second. A chip counted those vibrations down to one pulse a second, and a tiny motor moved the hand one step for each pulse. The result was good to a fifth of a second a day. A watch with no balance wheel in it at all would have passed Ball's inspection more easily than anything his men had ever opened.

The Swiss had one two years earlier. Their research centre in Neuchâtel tested a quartz watch at the observatory in August 1967, and it was ten times more accurate than their best mechanical chronometers. They made about six thousand. One account of the decision says quartz "was not a priority nor a threat."

Then the price fell through the floor. Hamilton's Pulsar, the first watch with no hands, cost $2,100 in gold in 1972. Texas Instruments was selling a plastic one for $20 by 1976 and for $9.95 by 1977. Between 1970 and the middle of the 1980s the number of Swiss watch companies fell from 1,600 to 600, and the number of people they employed fell from 90,000 to 28,000. Japan passed Switzerland as the biggest maker of watches in 1980.

What kept the Swiss in the business was a plastic watch that broke every rule Ball had written. The Swatch of 1983 had fifty-one parts instead of about 130. It was put together by machine and sealed into its case, so no inspector could ever open the back. It cost fifty francs, and two and a half million of them sold in under two years. Casio went further in the other direction with the F-91W of 1989. It is a plastic digital watch that costs about twelve pounds, runs seven years on one battery and is rated to thirty seconds a month, and it has now been made a hundred million times. That makes it the most produced watch there has ever been.

I make a daily game as well as these. Play today's sentence. No account, no app, and it costs less than a Casio.

Then the price went backwards

Switzerland went on making watches. What it stopped doing was selling them as a way of knowing the time, and the federation's own export figures show what that did over twenty-five years. In 2000 the country shipped 27 million quartz watches and two and a half million mechanical ones, and the two piles were worth almost exactly the same. Last year it shipped nine million quartz watches and five million mechanical ones, and the mechanical pile was worth six times as much. The average mechanical watch now leaves the country at about 4,000 francs. In 2000 it left at 1,800.

China exported 589 million watches last year at an average price of four dollars. Switzerland exported 14.6 million at an average of $2,018. The biggest Swiss maker is Rolex, which produces about 1.1 million watches a year with 10,542 people in Geneva and Bienne, and which has been owned outright by a charitable foundation since its founder died in 1960. In 2023 it opened a watchmaking school in Dallas, and the next year 560 people applied for 27 places. That is because fewer than two thousand trained watchmakers are left in the United States to look after the things. Somewhere between thirty and forty million fake watches are made every year, which is more than Switzerland makes real ones.

India had its own version of the whole story. HMT started making watches in Bangalore in 1961 with Citizen's help, and Nehru handed out the first batch himself. Its Janata became the retirement present of a generation of government clerks. The company made 115 million watches before its last plant shut on 1 May 2016, and by then Titan, which the Tatas had started in 1984, was on its way to the seventeen million a year it sells now.

Deloitte asks 6,500 people a year what they wear on their wrist. In 2020, 46% said a watch. In 2025, 26% did. Of the people planning to buy one this year, about a quarter still say the reason is to tell the time.

The watch you built holds Ball's two seconds a day. If someone oils it every ten years it will still hold them in a hundred, long after the phone in your pocket has gone into a drawer. The phone resets itself to an atomic clock every night.

Or skip the chart and do today's Long Story Short.

Every kind there is

Two questions decide what kind of watch you're holding: where the energy comes from, and what keeps the beat. Once you know those two, everything else is detail.