Recommended Reading: ‘Hands Of Time: A Watchmaker’s History Of Time’ By Rebecca Struthers

The process of building a horological library is one of the best ways to enjoy watch collecting without going broke (albeit it has the small disadvantage of meaning you’re acquiring books, not watches). There are several different categories, including personal reminiscences (A Man And His Watch) indispensable technical references (Watchmaking, by Daniels, and then any number of obscure and often out of print books like Complicated Watches And Their Repair, by Donald de Carle, which is largely written in the dry language of one professional offering terse advice to other professionals but which occasionally unbends enough to say that anyone attempting to repair a clock-watch or repeater ought to understand the mechanism well enough that if handed a shoebox full of parts, they would be able to assemble the movement without any diagrams or instructions, or to opine of the Patek automatic caliber 12”’ 500, “The quality of the movement is superb, the steelwork is straight-grained with edges broken and polished … the action is very simple and most ingenious, and there appears to be nothing to go wrong.”

There are of course many reference works designed specifically to offer comprehensive looks at certain types of watches, including Das Tourbillon (I am still waiting for an English translation although the book, which is nothing less than a stab at a complete history of the tourbillon, is responsible for my often giving Google Translate a workout) and books on certain categories of collectibles … in fact, once you start collecting books on watches, clockmaking, and horology things can get a little out of hand, just as they can with watches; the Horological Society of New York has a reference library with around twenty five thousand items, many of which are, unsurprisingly, books. What seem to be thin on the ground, however, among all the highly specialized works written over the past several hundred years (Gutenberg’s first printing press was in operation in around 1450, by which time mechanical clocks in Europe had already been around for probably two centuries) are works that speak to the inner spiritual and intellectual life of the watchmaker, and to the effects of revolutions in timekeeping on how we perceive time itself.

One of the best books I’ve ever read in this category, is a recent one from Dr. Rebecca Struthers, whose name is widely known among enthusiasts and who, with her husband Craig, work out of a workshop in Birmingham, UK, producing watches under their own names (Struthers Watchmakers) as well as performing restoration and repair work. Her book is Hands Of Time, A Watchmaker’s History Of Time. Hands Of Time is partly a history of timekeeping and the human relationship to time, and Struthers does a better than good job of walking us through the evolution of timekeeping. What sets her history apart from others, though, is the sense you get of the human dimension of watch and clockmaking, and sometimes, the human cost. Of the many threads of the story that stay with you from the book, one of the most memorable is Struthers’ account of the effects of precision timekeeping on human quality of life, during the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without ubiquitous clocks but Struthers points out that who, exactly, had the right to keep time was not exactly a democratic question; she writes, “Punctuality became profit … In 1737, Edmund Burke argued that it was ‘excessive rest and relaxation [that] can be fatal producing melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder,’ while hard work was ‘necessary to the the health of the body and the mind,'” and that if a worker had a watch, it could actually be confiscated by management under threat of termination. Quoting James Myles, author of Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies, she relates a first-person account from a factory worker in the mid-19the century, “In reality, there were no regular hours, masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression … a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss anyone who presumed to know too much about the science of horology.”

Behind Struthers’ gracefully phrased but unmistakeable outrage at the use of timekeeping for social control (which continues to be ubiquitous) is the life of a self-professed outsider who came into watchmaking through an unlikely series of life circumstances and career choices. In fact, her first choice was not horology, but medicine:

“I have always been fascinated by time, but I never set out to be a watchmaker. At school I wanted to be a pathologist (this was long before TV crime dramas hade forensics cool). I was an oddball who was fascinated by how things worked, particularly bodies. I wanted to help people, but I wasn’t always very good at actually talking to them; working with the dead, I reasoned, would save me a lot of difficult conversations with patients … when I was seventeen I dropped out of school and wound up on a silversmithing and jewellery course. As far as my friends and teachers were concerned, I might as well have run away to join the circus.”

The thread running through the entire book, and what sets it apart from anything else I’ve read on the history of time and timekeeping, is the single question, What does time feel like? How that has changed – from the deep connection of the natural world to the rhythms of the seasons, to the birth of agrarian civilization, down through the industrial revolution and up to the present, is what gives this book, in a category often known more for dryness than anything else, a warmth to go along with its rigor that’s a rarity in horological writing.

Hands Of Time: A Watchmaker’s History Of Time, is available on Amazon. All photos by Andy Pilsbury, via Struthers Watchmakers.