A Fortune for the Obsolete — The Mystery of the Mechanical Renaissance

Last time, we saw the paradox by which a cheap plastic watch called the Swatch rescued a dying Swiss watch industry. The profits and momentum earned by mass-produced cheap watches became the foundation that pushed mechanical watches back up toward the luxury path—that was the story.

Yet one puzzle remains. Quartz watches are more accurate than mechanical ones, cheaper, and require no maintenance. If a watch’s true job is to tell the correct time, the contest should have been settled long ago. And yet people came to pay sums large enough to buy a car for a machine driven by gears and springs—one that can drift by several minutes a month and periodically demands the cost of being taken apart and cleaned. In this chapter, we trace the revival of the mechanical watch that began in the 1990s—the phenomenon known as the mechanical renaissance—and consider, in both its light and its shadow, why people find value in an outdated machine.

The Watch That Stepped Down from Accuracy

What the quartz revolution laid bare was a fact cruel in its clarity: if the contest were over accuracy alone, the mechanical watch could never again beat quartz. Faced with this defeat, the mechanical watch made an interesting choice. It quietly stepped down from the arena of accuracy.

By accounts that have been reported, from the mid- to late 1980s, brands such as Rolex, Patek Philippe, and IWC kept their footing in mechanical watchmaking, while names like Blancpain and Ulysse Nardin, once acquired by other companies, were reborn as distinguished mechanical houses. In 1991, it is said, a new company carrying on the tradition of German mechanical watchmaking was born in Glashütte, in the state of Saxony that had once lain on the East German side. What they sought to sell was no longer an ‘accurate instrument.’ It was the mechanism itself, assembled by hand; the fact that hundreds of parts mesh together to mark time; and the centuries of tradition behind it. The watch was transforming into a product that sells meaning rather than function.

The mechanical watch, made obsolete as a practical instrument, took on a different kind of value for that very reason. This turning point became the starting line for the frenzy that followed.

The Magic Called an Asset

One reason great sums of money gathered around mechanical watches is that they came to be regarded as ‘assets.’ Watches appeared that could be sold for more than they cost.

A frequently told trigger is the existence of luxury sports watches. The Royal Oak, unveiled by Audemars Piguet in 1972, and the Nautilus, brought into the world by Patek Philippe in 1976, were both said to have been designed by Gérald Genta, and both were stainless-steel watches expensive for their time. At launch there were reportedly voices of bewilderment at their bold pricing, but over the following decades these became emblematic models traded on the secondhand market for figures far above their list prices. As the spread of the internet allowed information and market prices for watches to be shared around the world, new wealthy buyers and those seeking gains from appreciation flowed into the market. Some models became less a watch than a ‘possession’ bought and sold like stocks or gold.

That said, the watch-as-asset carries a clear shadow. When more people buy in the expectation of appreciation, it draws nearer to speculation. Watches fail to reach the hands of those who truly love and want them, as buyers seeking resale lock up the stock. Price became proof of popularity and, at the same time, a force that distorted the space for genuine enthusiasm. The magic called an asset gave the watch a new luster while also harboring the danger of turning a watch into something that is no longer a watch.

A Return to Status and Story

Even so, it cannot be said that every fortune paid for a mechanical watch was aimed at the gains of appreciation. What drew many people was a more elemental feeling.

One is status—the sense that what you wear speaks for who you are. The small machine wrapped around the wrist conveys, without words, effort and success, devotion and aesthetic sense. There are still occasions when the watch glimpsed at the cuff of a suit functions like a kind of calling card. The other is a return to story. In an age when the smartphone tells the time, those who deliberately choose a hand-wound or self-winding watch are drawn not to convenience but to the history that watch carries, the fact that an artisan finished it by hand, and a sense of life in a mechanism that keeps moving. Passed from parent to child, given to oneself at life’s milestones—people layer their own story onto a watch.

It is not all light. The desire for story and status sometimes overheats and pushes the watch away from its rightful users. For those who cannot buy one, it becomes both an object of longing and a measure of distance to the unreachable. The revival of the mechanical watch held in the same palm both the richness of the human heart and the runaway of desire.

By stepping down from accuracy and donning meaning, the mechanical watch revived vividly at the close of the twentieth century. Yet right there, near the wrist, a presence was quietly preparing to appear—one that would question the history of the watch from its very roots once more. Yet upon the wrist, an entirely new kind of watch had already appeared.