HISTORY
“I can foresee a time when we could produce a limited edition piece for our afficionado customers.” Chris Ward.
Developments and refinements made by Harrison’s British contemporaries over two centuries lead eventually to the possibility of watches so small that they could be transferred from pocket to wrist. Initially – by the end of the 19th century – wristwatches were foremost pieces of jewellery for women, prized for their beauty rather than worn for their time keeping capabilities. The first known wristwatch was launched by Patek Philippe in 1868. But the wars of the early 20th century changed the need
key to UK watchmaking’s demise, but is also the key to its current revival, as Radio 4’s In Business programme told.
In the 1800s the British watchmaking sector was largely based in small workshops in the then unwholesome Clerkenwell area of London. Attempts to mechanise the industry, including by Swiss inventor Pierre-Frederic Ingold who tried to start factories in England and France as well as Switzerland, were resisted.
Two of
Christopher Ward’s
watchmakers - Simon and Max - at work at CW’s Maidenhead watch clinic.
from fashion to function as the world’s armies, navies and air forces drove the development of accurate, practical, easily readable wristwatches.
And today while many of the luxury watches on the
market owe their provenance to the worlds of naval and aviation forces, they have come full circle and are often as much about fashion and style as they are about accuracy and function.
So what happened to the UK’s flourishing watch- making industry after the massive strides it made in the 18th and 19th centuries? Industrialisation is the
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British watchmakers building handmade products for the wealthy failed to see the potential of taking pocket watches to the masses. Ingold went to the United States in the mid 1800s, and is thought to have been influential in the setting up of mass production in Waltham in 1854. By the late 19th century the Swiss were also mechanising watch production, and became the elite producers of the world.
History repeated itself when the Swiss were caught out by the development of quartz watches in the 1960s,
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