The Inventors
Watchmaking emerged from the individual talent of certain men who defied the laws of physics to offer their fellow beings, like modern Prometheuses, a tool for measuring time. These horological figures invented mechanisms of ever-increasing precision to achieve the goal of capturing the passage of hours and minutes within a dial.
The anchor escapement (Robert Hooke, 1670), the cycloidal pendulum for clocks, and the balance spring for watches (Christian Huygens, late 17th century) were developments in this direction. These renowned watchmakers are remembered as pioneers. Concurrently, in the Swiss Jura, another individual laid the foundations for watchmaking as an industry: Daniel Jeanrichard, with his modern vision of the division of labor and task sharing within the field of horology.
Many other famous inventor watchmakers followed: those who tirelessly worked on the development of marine chronometers (George Graham, designer of the mercury pendulum of the same name; John Harrison), and those who developed more sophisticated mechanisms for traditional watches and clocks (the Frenchman Julien Le Roy and his equation clock). We should also mention the experimenters and theoreticians who, not content with advancing the science of horology, contributed to its longevity (Ferdinand Berthoud, inventor of the detent escapement and author of numerous works).
However, watchmaking could not be – and never was – solely a matter of mechanisms. It also required an infusion of beauty and mystery. This was achieved, each in their own way, by the Swiss Pierre Jaquet-Droz, creator of fantastic automatons that were often mistaken for sorcery, and Abraham-Louis Breguet, renowned among famous watchmakers, who designed fundamentally original and elegant works. As the inventor of the tourbillon, the lever escapement with shared impulse surfaces, and the “Breguet” overcoil, he is undoubtedly the horological figure who ushered his art into the era of modernity, as early as the 18th century.
The Businessmen
Beyond its inventions, watchmaking is also defined by its brands. Indeed, famous watchmakers founded equally renowned manufactures. Thus, horological figures are also those who established globally recognized brands and who adeptly tackled the industry to alter its trajectory, sometimes during periods of crisis.
It was Hans Wilsdorf, German by birth and British by adoption, who brought his ambitions to life in the form of a globally renowned brand, symbolizing the universality of the watch object: Rolex. It was also the presence of mind and commercial acumen of Nicolas Hayek who, at the height of the most severe crisis ever experienced by the Swiss watch industry in the early 1970s, responded to the threat of the quartz watch with a merger of efforts (the creation of the Swiss Society for Microelectronics and Watchmaking) and the salvific launch of a small watch now more famous than most of the aforementioned horological figures: the Swatch.
