The Nobility of Timekeeping ― The Pride Geneva Protected

In the previous episode, we watched the pocket watch leave the pocket, get strapped to soldiers’ wrists on the battlefield, and transform into the wristwatch. The watch entered people’s lives widely, as a practical tool.

But in the same era, in the quiet workshops of Geneva, Switzerland, a kind of watchmaking pointed in an entirely different direction carried on. Not faster, not cheaper. More complex, more beautiful, more refined ― there were craftsmen who sought to tear the watch away from the frame of a utilitarian object and raise it to the heights of art.

Today, their lineage is gathered into three names called the ‘Holy Trinity’: Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet. Here, we look closely at the story of the aristocrats of the watch world.

The Oldest Heartbeat in the World, Beating Since 1755

The oldest history among the three houses belongs to Vacheron Constantin.

In September 1755, a twenty-four-year-old Jean-Marc Vacheron set up a watchmaking workshop in the Saint-Gervais district of Geneva. The company dates its founding to this year, when records show he hired his first apprentice. Since then it has been regarded as the oldest surviving watch manufacturer never to have interrupted production, and its history now approaches two hundred and seventy years.

A second name was added in the nineteenth century. François Constantin, gifted in commerce, joined the Vacheron family business as a partner. The words attributed to Constantin, who took on the role of expanding sales across the world ― ‘Do better if possible, and that is always possible’ ― are still passed down today as the company’s guiding principle. The craftsman’s skill, and the commercial talent to carry it to the world. The joining of these two became the backbone of the brand.

The Exiled Noble and the Genius Engineer ― Patek Philippe

Among the three houses, the one whose ‘story’ has been told the most is surely Patek Philippe.

The founder, Antoine Norbert de Patek, is said to have been an exiled noble from Poland. Having left his homeland and moved to Switzerland, he poured a refined aesthetic sense into watchmaking. His business, begun in 1839, took on its present form in 1851 ― because of a meeting with a young, already prominent genius engineer, Jean Adrien Philippe.

Philippe had invented a mechanism that allowed the winding of the mainspring and the setting of the time, until then done with a small key, to be operated by a single crown. Deeply impressed by this innovation that did away with the key, Patek welcomed Philippe as a formal partner. Thus ‘Patek Philippe,’ placing the two men’s names side by side, was born. An engineer and a man of refined taste joined hands as equals.

The company still holds dear, as a cherished value, that it remains an independent manufacture run as a family business in Geneva. Its stance of preserving production records from 1851 onward and being able to repair, as needed, every watch it has ever made is firmly bound to the idea that ‘a watch is something to be handed down to the next generation.‘

920 Parts ― The Summit Called Complication

What most symbolizes the prestige of the three houses is the intricate mechanism called the ‘complication.’

Not only telling the time, but displaying the calendar, tracking the phases of the moon, holding a stopwatch function, and even announcing the time by sound ― such added functions are packed into a machine of nothing but hands and gears. The ones that gather many functions into a single piece are called the ‘grande complication,’ and have been regarded as the true summit of watchmaking.

One piece that symbolizes that summit is the pocket watch Patek Philippe completed in 1933. Ordered in 1925 by the American banker Henry Graves Jr., this watch took three years to design and a further five years to build, and held as many as twenty-four complications. A perpetual calendar, a moon-phase display, a chronograph able to time two events at once, and an astronomical display that even reproduced the night sky as seen from the owner’s New York home. The number of parts used is said to have reached fully nine hundred and twenty.

This watch was reported to have sold at a 2014 auction for about twenty-four million Swiss francs, becoming a record in the history of watchmaking. How a technology of hands and gears, aged through time, can keep drawing people in. A single pocket watch embodies that question.

The Day a Sports Watch Saved the Nobility

The youngest of the three houses, Audemars Piguet, was founded in 1875 in the Vallée de Joux in the Swiss Jura mountains, by Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet. It is a house that excelled at complications and honed its skills in the fields of ultra-thin movements and highly complicated watches.

Then, in 1972, this brand of high noble standing released a piece that overturned conventional wisdom: the ‘Royal Oak.’ The design was by Gérald Genta, later called a legendary watch designer. With an octagonal bezel fastened by six screws and a case and bracelet crafted as one, this watch ― though a luxury timepiece ― used stainless steel as its material.

At the time, the conventional wisdom held that a luxury watch was made of gold or platinum, and the idea of pricing a steel watch on par with a gold one was hard to grasp. It is said that at launch it was met with bewilderment. Yet this bold piece would go on to carve out the very new genre of the ‘luxury sports watch.’ To not merely guard tradition, but at times to betray conventional wisdom ― that too may have been the wisdom by which the nobility survived.

In the workshops of Geneva and the Jura, craftsmen kept polishing watches by a logic apart from utility. If the aim were merely to know the time more accurately, cheaper and more reliable tools would eventually appear. And yet they bet on complexity and beauty. Why do people seek from a watch something more than knowing the time ― the source of that question lies here.

But the ruler of watches most deeply beloved by the masses in the twentieth century would appear from somewhere apart from these aristocrats, with a wholly different idea. The next episode is the story of a single name that seized the world with waterproofing and automatic winding.