Curiosa

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CURIOSA HOROLOGICA

In April 1903, the Strand Magazine (an English illustrated monthly, best known as the original vehicle for the Sherlock Holmes stories) published
this picture of a giant movement produced as a promotional stunt by the
American Waltham Watch Company. The caption does not give the
size but mentions that the movement weighed 120lb and was
normally housed in a display case nearly two feet high.

Advertisement for the long-established Paris firm of Le Roy et Fils, 1857. The greatest of the Le Roys were Julien (1699-1759) and his son Pierre, a very close rival of John Harrison as chronometer inventor (1717-1785).

“This present* was a repeating watch with a double case. I learned from Mr. le Catt that [the King] had given the most particular directions for procuring the best English watch that was to be had; that the price was one hundred louis; and that he had used it for a week to be certain that it was a good one. The watch, however, proved to be a miserable article made at Augsburg, and at the end of two years was incapable of being repaired.”

*From Frederick the Great of Prussia to Dieudonné Thiebault of the Prussian Academy.

THIEBAULT, Original Anecdotes of Frederic the Great (1805)

This is the balance-wheel from a Savage-escapement watch. George Savage's modification of the lever escapement has two pins on the roller table instead of one; both deal with locking, one on clockwise arcs and the other on anti-clockwise. Impulse is provided by the pin on top of the lever (guard-pin) acting in the cut-out of the roller, which is deeper than usual. This gold wheel probably belongs to a quality watch of about 1850-60.

I call this movement ‘The Un-Dead’. It has lost its case, hands, dial and endstone, as well as a screw or two; the brass parts are black in places and green in others; and yet it runs, a little weakly but quite steadily and for a full 24 hours. It is a 9-jewel English movement of about 1860.

WATCHMAKERS' MENAGERIE

English makers of the 1760s, as listed in Baillie's Watchmakers and Clockmakers of the World, include John Catt and Richard Mouse, Henry Duck, John Cock, Robert Fish, Edward Trout, Joseph Fox and Robert Swan. Robert Pigg worked in London nearly a century earlier, while in post-Napoleonic Paris there was a maker named Pigeon.

On the right is an ‘arcaded’ dial of about 1750. This style is especially
associated with the Netherlands, where it is found on clocks as well as
watches. There is a noticeable contrast between the ‘arches’ and the
strictly circular sections of the minute track, the brush-strokes of the
latter being much finer and more regular; evidently circles or part-circles
could be drawn with some kind of mechanical aid such as a turntable,
whereas the arches had to be executed freehand. Probably the track
was initially drawn as two complete circles, the unwanted parts of which
were then washed out and replaced with the arches.

“Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (writing in 1784)