There have been some pretty interesting thoughts lately on the subject of what constitutes quality in fine watchmaking and what constitutes quality in watchmaking in general. Tony Traina over at Unpolished recently published, “Watches Keep Getting Better. It Might Also Be Their Biggest Problem” in which he presents the thesis that major advances in everything from supply chains to manufacturing processes has made it easier than ever to produce more accurate watches with more interesting designs with better performance, in a wider range than ever before – and that all these advances have the paradoxical and unintended consequence of erasing the craft by which watches used to be produced, at least some of them. At Pointless Complication, Velociphile advances the same argument, in “When Perfection Becomes Cheap, Nothing Is Perfect” saying that what we largely get today even from the best makers of series produced watches, are machine generated simulations of craftsmanship rather than craftsmanship itself. And Kingflum asks “Is Perfection Killing The Watch Industry?” which is an interesting way to phrase the problem; he puts the problem with admirable exactness and bluntness: “But for now, when a sub-£5,000 micro brand watch can realistically be compared with branded pieces which cost five times more, that question comes up again: what exactly are we paying for?”

I don’t think anyone would argue that the amount of hand-craft has diminished in fine watchmaking – if you look at any newer movement introduced by a luxury watch brand over the last fifteen years, and compare to some of the movements in use by brands like Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, or Vacheron Constantin in the 1950s and early to mid-1960s, the newer movements suffer by comparison – or rather, they suffer by comparison if you hold them to a certain standard, about which more in a minute. Bridge architecture has been simplified, finishing increasingly is the result of laser etching, diamond tool CNC machining and other automated processes, and it’s become increasingly difficult to see a difference between precision made industrial watches from companies like Grand Seiko and Rolex (there are always caveats here, Grand Seiko also produces hand-finished watches and movements at Micro Artist Studio) and newer movements from the traditional Big Three.

The basic problem is one that SJX framed with characteristic brevity and clarity in his 2019 article, “Movement Finishing In The Instagram Age,” in which he points out that “movement finishing has become something of a spectator sport,” and makes the equally relevant point, “Hand finishing techniques are difficult to master, practiced by few, and do not scale. As such, these techniques place a natural limit on production efficiency and output, and thus serve as a de facto guarantee of exclusivity.”

A Million Watches A Year

It’s easy to think that there might have been a period in time when all watches were finished by hand, with thought and care and love, and were individual works of art but this idea doesn’t withstand five minutes of scrutiny. Watchmaking was never some sort of noble holdout against industrialization. It has been pursuing industrialization for as long as industrialization has existed; in the United States, by the end of the 19th century, Waltham was making over a million watches a year and while not all of them were railroad grade chronometers, that’s still a boatload of quality mechanical manufacturing – Waltham was making watches at Rolex scale in the 19th century, which is I think an easy thing to forget. Without the industrialization of watchmaking, the personal watch would have remained what it was before manufacturing methods originally developed to make interchangeable parts for firearms – a small batch, high cost activity available only to the relatively affluent (up to and including the super rich, and military forces like blue water navies, for which precision ship’s chronometers were indispensable and a strategic military resource). Precision timekeeping and the industrial revolution had a symbiotic relationship; without the industrial revolution precision timekeeping on an industrial scale, or even a scale meaningful nationally and strategically, would have been impossible but without precision timekeeping – for everything from rationalized production lines, to military operations – the Industrial Revolution couldn’t have happened either.

Industrialization and production of watches at scale, was what gave the world for the first time the problem of distinguishing between an OK watch and actual fine watchmaking. Precision became more and more rapidly, something you could achieve on an industrial scale, so if the difference is less and less actual performance, then what is it? Or is there a connection between performance and hand finishing after all?

Precision And Finishing

In order to answer the last question I think it helps to look at some examples, across a wider range of production, of high precision timepieces from the pre-quartz era but also from the period after it became possible to produce precision watches at scale; let’s say just for the sake of argument, the late 19th century. Part of this depends on what you mean by “at scale” – marine chronometers had to be produced in large numbers for navies and merchant marines, but this is a matter of producing some hundreds of timekeepers rather than the thousands – or millions – being made in American watch factories. The Nautical Review magazine, in 1833, gives us an idea of how quickly marine chronometers became commonly used in the Royal Navy:

“When Lord Howe sailed from Spithead, previous to the memorable first of June [a naval battle in 1794], it is said that a chronometer was not to be found in his fleet. Some of His Majesty’s ships sailed about the same time, for the protection of the trade in the East Indies. These were the Centurion, the Orpheus, and the Resistance, on board of which vessels no chronometer was to be found; and, instead of making the passage to Madras in ninety or a hundred days, a circumstance which is now of every-day occurence, it cost them more than six months. Since those days, however, great changes have taken place in the whole science of navigation. Chronometers, from being scarce, and immoderately expensive, are now become plentiful and cheap; they are liberally supplied by the government to the ships of the state; and, in proportion as their number has increased, so has a knowledge of their use been cultivated.”

(Quoted from an earlier story on this Substack, on marine chronometers and their use on HMS Beagle during Darwin’s circumnavigation of the world.)

These were still hand made products, although by 1833, the first phase of the Industrial Revolution had already progressed to the point that the initial economic benefits were beginning to level off. By the 1880s, however, mass production of steel, inventions such as electrification of cities and the development of electrical power grids, and the development of mass production assembly lines, had revolutionized the industrial manufacture of precision machinery, including watches. Watch manufacturers, especially in the United States, were quick to take advantage of the economies of scale offered by mass production of watches. Even earlier than that, however, Antoine Norbert de Patek, on the occasion of his first visit to New York in 1854, noted that “Americans demand above all inexpensive watches which, nevertheless, should allow them to determine the speed of their horses to an accuracy of 1/4 of a second.” Industrialization came to the Swiss watch industry later than to the US, but come it did and thus a division eventually arose between fine and industrial watchmaking. This is reflected in production numbers; according to one study, in the period 1946 to about 1962, Patek made about 6,600 to 7,000 watches per year, and did not reach an annual production of 10,000 pieces per year until 1964. By contrast Omega in the same period reached production of a million watches per year. These were high quality watches, obviously, but earlier in the 20th century watches with inexpensive pin pallet escapements were being made in even more enormous numbers and such movements found their way into entry level pocket and wristwatches, and also into novelty watches, including the Ingersoll Mickey Mouse watches. By the end of World War I, Ingersoll had sold over 50 million watches and in the mid 1960s, one out of every three watches sold in the US was a Timex – the US company that was the direct descendant of Ingersoll.

The advent of quartz watches made inexpensive mechanical watches obsolete, and after losing most of its market share as a mass producer of quality watches, Swiss mechanical watchmaking had to reinvent itself as primarily a maker of luxury mechanical timepieces, although even prior to the advent of quartz, a “fine Swiss watch” was a different product from the mass produced mechanical watches made by companies like Timex. Entry level industrial watchmaking essentially collapsed thanks to quartz watches, and what was left was predominantly, although not exclusively, mechanical watchmaking as a luxury.

This is all by way of saying that what constitutes fine finishing, and the extent to which such finishing can and should be expected to be executed by hand, varies enormously depending on the historical and economic and market contexts in which a watch is produced. The style of finishing which we consider “fine” today is in fact a highly specific one historically and geographically speaking, and it’s far from true that fine hand finishing is necessary to produce a high quality mechanical watch. Fine hand finishing is usually evaluated today by collectors and enthusiasts in the very narrow context of Swiss-French watchmaking, as it evolved from roughly the mid-19th century. The use of nickel, German silver, and later rhodium plated brass, combined with a full bridge design, highly polished anglage and flanks, Geneva stripes, and highly finished steel surfaces, is one way to produce a fine watch, and one vocabulary to use when producing a hand-finished watch, but it’s not the only way.

To see just how much qualitative excellence, and this type of specific finishing style, can or cannot exist in the same watch, I’d like to now introduce one of the single greatest resources for visual education about watchmaking and watch finishing on the Internet: Steve G’s Watch Launchpad. The Launchpad1 is straightforward. It originated in the very early days of the watch internet, when forums like Timezone.com were the primary vehicles for enthusiast interaction. The Launchpad is a series of articles, copiously illustrated with high resolution photographs, which show the exterior and more importantly for our purposes, the movements of an incredible range of watches, from early independents to mass produced high grade timepieces, to wristwatch and pocket chronometers.

One of the great things about the Watch Launchpad, is that Steve Gurevitz, the Steve G in question, is an almost perfect reporter from an image standpoint. The photos considerably predate social media, and represent a period when enthusiast watch photography took it as a given that what you would want to see was as clear a representation of the watch, and the movement, as possible, and that such pictures should allow the technical features of both watches and movements to be clearly visible. Every movement gets the same clear, even lighting; exposure and framing are consistent and as a result, his photos, in their breadth and number, allow you to judge a watch on its own merits. There is a section specifically devoted to chronometers which I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s here that we can see just how diverse finishing can be, even in the world of chronometer grade, and observatory competition chronometer watches:

As you can see, it’s essentially impossible to generalize about what fine finishing should be in the context of precision timekeeping. These watch movements were all produced for different reasons, in different numbers (sometimes very different numbers). They demonstrate, I think, that the answer to “what exactly am I paying for” has varied enormously over the history of mechanical horology, even viewed through the relatively narrow perspective of precision mechanical watchmaking. You might want to argue that the fine finishing – the traditional Genevan fine finishing – visible in the Patek is the result of small scale production to a high workshop standard, but all you have to do is look at a Breguet garde temps pocket watch to realize that this isn’t necessarily the case either:

The movement gives the immediate impression of superb craftsmanship – or does it? If you’ve been conditioned to think that the Swiss Genevan style of movement finishing represents an absolute, you might not think so. No anglage, no polished flanks, no highly polished countersinks, certainly no Geneva stripes, certainly no sharp inner corners – and this is an entirely hand-made watch, a one-off, made by one of the greatest watchmakers of all time.

So what exactly are we paying for, in luxury watchmaking? We’re not paying for precision, which has become something we simply expect in a luxury watch, but mass produced precision is something that happens today to the tune of millions of watches a year. We’re not paying for fine hand finishing – first of all, outside of independent horology, and a small number of high end pieces produced by heritage brands (and higher end pieces by relative newcomers to the fine finishing game, like Grand Seiko and Credor) it doesn’t exist in modern luxury watchmaking to any meaningful degree, or at least, it doesn’t seem to be evident in modern luxury movement production. Fine hand finishing historically may accompany precision, but it certainly doesn’t have to (that Omega) and in any case what hand finishing means is so variable that it’s impossible to say categorically that one style (the Swiss Genevan style, for instance) represents the best possible approach. George Daniels famously says in Watchmaking that a gentleman client for a fine hand made English pocket watch would have considered it beneath him to take notice of movement finishing and would have considered it “a matter for tradesmen” and that when watchmakers have no real problems to solve, they “distract themselves by creating a jewel-like finish.”

Over about a 14 year period, between 2000 and 2014, Philippe Dufour produced around 200 Simplicity watches – that’s 14 watches per year, and the movements aren’t made entirely in his workshop (they’re based on the Valjoux VZSS) which meant more time devoted to finishing to his incredibly high standard. I’ve seen and handled several Simplicities over the years and I don’t think there is a watch I would want more (although there are several I would want as much, including a Roger Smith Series 1, speaking of non-Swiss fine finishing). Now, here’s the thing – Patek Philippe makes 60,000 watches a year, more or less; Audemars Piguet, around 50,000; Vacheron comes in last of the traditional Big Three, at an estimated 30,000 per year; actual production numbers vary depending on the market but those are reasonable round numbers. There are not enough watchmakers in all the world to hand-finish 140,000 watches, much less in Switzerland; the Swiss government said in 2023 that there were about 60,000 people working in the watch industry, total. In the same year, those 60,000 people were responsible for CHF 29.8 billion in export value, so you might say they’re earning their fendant and cheese. And that’s in the entire industry – CNC programmers, service centers, component makers, logistics, supply chain managers, the whole nine yards. The Swiss watch industry is completely dependent on industrialization and has been for over a century, and without industrialization of luxury watchmaking, I wonder whether the sector would exist at all.

Many years ago I talked to the then-CEO of Vacheron Constantin, Juan-Carlos Torres, who started at Vacheron as an accountant in 1981. He said things were pretty grim – they didn’t know from one month to the next if they would be able to make payroll, and he said that when he started, he was issued one pencil – if he wanted a new pencil, he had to go down the hall to the lady who issued office supplies, and she’d measure his pencil to see if it was short enough to justify giving him a new one. Now, are we being hoodwinked by automated, or semi-automated finishing? That is a question almost impossible to answer categorically. There are degrees to everything and it’s not as if there’s straight industrial, totally mechanized finishing on the one hand and Rexhep Rexhepi on the other, and nothing in between. Much of the problem I think has to do with the breathtaking price increases we’ve seen in luxury watchmaking over the last fifteen years, and especially over the last five years, but I don’t think industrial luxury is really the problem; it’s part of a larger picture that includes skyrocketing demand, the rise of the meme/hype watch, and expectations on the part of collectors which while understandable, may not be entirely realistic.

And, rising prices. This is an issue which is, lest we forget, not confined to luxury brands – sure you can argue, and we should, that there is increasingly a disconnect between the quality offered and price asked in mass luxury watchmaking, but I’m not sure there isn’t an argument to be made that a simple time-only watch, no matter whose name is on the dial, shouldn’t be a six figure watch either, irrespective of how shiny the edges are. And fetishizing one particular style of movement finishing doesn’t help. I sometimes think that “sharp inner corner” is the new “in-house movement” – that there is one out of innumerable possible sets of criteria that’s being used to evaluate everything, which fundamentally ignores context, and which flattens out the considerable nuance and considerable challenge in really evaluating finish in particular, and quality in general.

“People often ask Watchbore two questions. The first is, is my watch worth what I paid for it? The second is, Is my watch a good watch? The answer to the first question is always, No. The answer to the second question is always, It depends.”2