Henry Ford always maintained that Taylorism and Fordism had practically nothing to do with each other, and this was almost true; Ford drew more influence from another successful branch of American industry, the abattoir. (The car production line only started rolling after Ford moved to new premises in Detroit in 1913, which was around 70 years after one of the earliest conveyor-style assembly lines started at the works of Richard Garrett & Sons, a company making portable steam engines in England in the 1840s.) But there were a couple of similarities between Taylor and Ford: both wished to restore pride and prosperity to American manufacturing, and both threatened to legitimise – through science and the appetites of the market – the dominance of the machine (be it the machine of management or the machine of steel) over the power of the individual.
Taylor’s greatest critics cite this as Taylor’s greatest ill. His considerations of time and profit greatly changed the way many large industries were geared through the middle of the century (not least in the booming manufacture of stopwatches), but the rigidity of the system had detrimental effects on prosperity and industrial relations in the longer term. It was one of the reasons why Japan forged ahead after the war, and why the Japanese system was widely adopted elsewhere in the world in the 1980s.
If he is remembered at all, Frederick Winslow Taylor is recalled primarily as a pioneering and influential maverick. His biographer Robert Kanigel writes that he enjoyed a far more varied and aesthetic life than the one he proposed for the majority of his workers. He always stayed in the best hotels, drew large royalties from his innovations in steel cutting, and worked when it suited him. Often he seemed not to understand the quantity of negative disruption his schemes left in their trail. But there is something else he bestowed beyond just a coercive top-heavy management theory and strict bean-counting. ‘Taylor bequeathed a clockwork world of tasks timed to the hundredth of the minute,’ Kanigel wrote in 1997. ‘He helped instil in us the fierce, unholy obsession with time, order, productivity and efficiency that marks our age. Foreign visitors to America often remark on the rushed, breathless quality of our lives. Taylor – whose life, from 1856 to 1917, almost exactly coincided with the [American] Industrial Revolution at its height – helped make us that way.’ Kanigel notes that when John Sculley, one-time chairman of Apple, delivered his address at an economic conference organised by President-elect Bill Clinton in Little Rock in 1994, Taylorism was specifically mentioned as a system from which the modern world should be liberated.
In its place, a new shackle. Our digital world would have astonished Taylor, but by the time modern business came to be controlled by computers he would have been shocked by so much else as well. He could not have foreseen the rise of Asia, nor the ideal of the eight-hour day, nor indeed the place of women in the workforce. But then again, nothing dates as fast as our perception of the future. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that in a century we would work only 15 hours a week and wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves the rest of the time.9 Certainly we wouldn’t need our professional time-management books or advice on how to reclaim 18 extra ‘me minutes’ from every day. Instead, we would spend all our time at the movies and be afflicted with something known as ‘the problem of leisure’. And how, I wonder, is that particular problem working out for you at the moment?
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1 ‘Time – The Next Source of Competitive Advantage’, by George Stalk, Jr, Harvard Business Review, July 1988.
2 This time-based innovation has ensured that Japanese and other Far Eastern manufacturing companies continue to produce televisions and products from plastic injection moulds in one-third of the time required in the US, and time has become a more critical measurement than the traditional financial indicators of success. The lead in technical innovation and design may have swung from Japan to the digital industries of Silicon Valley, but the most efficient mass manufacture – from the latest phones to the most lavish books – is commandeered by plants in Asia.
3 The concept of equating time with money was something that would have been familiar in Rome 2,000 years ago. The phrase ‘Time is Money’ was popularised by Benjamin Franklin in Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748, collected among his memoirs). A few years later he offered a further explanation, recalling his days as a printer in London in the 1720s. ‘He that is prodigal of his Hours, is, in effect, a Squanderer of Money. I remember a notable Woman, who was fully sensible of the intrinsic Value of Time. Her Husband was a Shoemaker, and an excellent Craftsman, but never minded how the Minutes passed. In vain did she inculcate to him, That Time is Money . . .’
4 Conserving national resources was a sensible wish; it became a prescient necessity when the US entered the war six years later. But the desire to make the country great again may have appeared a tired political slogan even then. The belief of a better past is clearly a compelling one, but whether the past was better in the days of Taylor and Roosevelt in 1911 or in the mind of Donald Trump in 2016 is difficult to say.
5 The ‘foot-pound’ measurement was a rough gauge of expended energy, as applicable to hands as to feet; at one stage it was called ‘human horsepower’. Taylor’s work on time would soon be extended by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, whose application of psychological and spatial work methods resulted in the more refined ‘time and motion’ studies of the workplace. Broadly speaking, the Gilbreths introduced a more human element into the study of labour management, more concerned with the holistic potential of human capital (rather than just output), and thus paving the way for more modern forms of personnel management and ‘human resources’. They also applied their time and motion methods to their family of twelve children, as detailed in their biographical novel Cheaper by the Dozen.
6 E.P. Thompson’s famous essay ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ (Past and Present, 1967) contains a fascinating survey of the distribution and use of clocks and other timing mechanisms in the workplace. He suggests that a surprising number of labourers in industrial England at the start of the nineteenth century owned pocket watches, perhaps their most valuable and prized possession. But these were often banned from cotton mills and other factories. Rather than workers controlling their output by their own time, it was time itself that was the master; owners would put the clocks back in the evening to artificially lengthen the working day.
7 Taylor suggested that ‘soldiering’ in the United States translated as ‘hanging it out’ in England and ‘ca canae’ in Scotland.
8 Although Chaplin claimed that Modern Times was a meditation on the Great Depression and the soullessness of the jobs that survived it (the factory sequence only occupies the first quarter of the film), the fact that many viewers made a link with Ford was to be expected. Chaplin visited Henry Ford and his son Edsel at their Highland Park site in Detroit in 1923, and there is a photograph of them standing in front of a large machine that would not have been out of place in the movie.
9 One of Keynes’s other predictions is, however, proving difficult to dispute. ‘In the long run,’ he said, ‘we are all dead’.
Buzz Aldrin and his Omega: still lost in space.
Chapter Eleven
Horology Part Two: How to Sell the Time
i) Vasco da Gama Special Edition
A Timex arrives in the post. Four days earlier I had seen it advertised in a magazine, and I justified my purchase with the thought that if I buy this model for £59.99 I won’t then be tempted by one of the other, and frankly ridiculous, watches advertised on the other pages of the magazine, almost all of which cost thousands of pounds more. It’s a Timex Expedition Scout, made in the USA, chunky and wide at 40mm, a size that’s all the rage at the moment, a thick beige nylon strap that looks like canvas, and a design that owes much to the military. It’s not a complex thing: a quartz analogue movement, only one old-fashioned time-setting crown and no ugly stopwatch buttons or moon-phase nonsense, no see-through crystal backing that lets you glimpse the movement (prob
ably because on this Timex all you’d really see is a battery), a second hand that purposely jolts with each second rather than skimming over the face, a brass case made to resemble polished steel, no jewels whatsoever, a small date indicator that must be corrected at the end of every February, water resistance to 50 metres, Arabic numerals, buckle clasp, a trademarked Indiglo feature that lets you press the crown and see the whole watch illuminated in aquamarine, important for night glances and dangerous missions. But I do not perform dangerous missions; I do not need the deep-water resistance either, or the bizarrely loud noise from the movement that means the watch has to be put in a drawer overnight to dull the sound, thus rendering the Indiglo feature unusable. So why did I buy this watch? More significantly, why does anyone living in the twenty-first century ever need to buy another watch of any sort ever again?
These are not the sort of questions to trouble the watch industry or its marketing departments. Indeed, the watch industry’s busy marketing departments are the answer to the questions. I bought a watch, and so will millions of others, purely because of marketing: we are sold the need to keep and display time at every turn, and the more we don’t need to buy a watch, the more pervasive the sell. Readers of high-end magazines will be familiar with a process, a negotiation, which involves turning over forests of paper before reaching the contents page. Open the New York Times and the paper appears to be ticking. Along with a bit of perfumery, jewellery and cars, the selling of watches is keeping print journalism alive.
In the first few pages of a recent Vanity Fair, in order:
1. ‘“Tradition” is too conventional for the work we undertake. We sculpt, paint and explore. But sculptors, painters and explorers we are not. There is no word for what we do. There is only a way. The Rolex Way.’
2. ‘The Vallée de Joux. For millennia a harsh, unyielding environment; and since 1875 the home of Audemars Piguet, in the village of Le Brassus. The early watchmakers were shaped here, in awe of the force of nature yet driven to master its mysteries through the complex mechanics of their craft.’
(The text appears on a manipulated photo of a dark forest illuminated by a full moon.)
3. ‘In homage to the European explorer and his need for utmost precision, Montblanc pays special tribute with the Montblanc Heritage Chronométrie Quantième Complet Vasco da Gama Special Edition featuring a full calendar and a blue lacquered constellation around the moon phase, which shows the exact same night sky above the Cape of Good Hope as Vasco da Gama observed it in 1497 on his first journey to India. Visit and shop at Montblanc.com.’
(Accompanied by photo of man with a shoulder bag about to get onto a helicopter.)
These advertisements are designed to snare the general reader. The advertisements for those already ensnared – the horological connoisseur, those who already have many watches and are looking for something else to add to the glistening pile – go far deeper. They have to: only a wartime spiv would consider wearing more than one watch at a time, and so the others languish in a case or vault or winding machine, redundant in all but sparkle and investment potential. Besides, having more than one watch on the go simultaneously is unnerving: one watch provides us with the confidence that we know the time accurately; two watches, each showing a slightly different time, surely shatters this illusion. And then there’s the cost: spending tens of thousands of pounds on an item that was once essential but is now redundant requires, one would imagine, a fair bit of persuasion. And so these advertisements must appeal to a different side of our nature, and they do this by becoming plainly absurd and overreaching. I once attended a watchmakers’ convention, and I provided my email address on the registration document, so of course I continue to receive emails from many exhibitors selling their newest wares. I always open them with delight:
Dear Simon GARFIELD
Franc Vila is pleased to present you the FV EVOS 18 Cobra Suspended Skeleton in texalium. Please find enclosed the PR kit and discover this new timepiece.
Best regards,
Ophélie
I couldn’t wait to open the attachment, not least to find out more about texalium, a substance so new that it didn’t yet have an entry on Wikipedia. ‘Oh time, suspend your flight,’ the PR kit began; this is for me, I thought. ‘Taken from the famous poem by French writer Alphonse de Lamartine, these words wonderfully sum up the new Cobra with its suspended skeleton movement . . . In order to appreciate the inner mechanical workings, the timepiece has eliminated the dial and replaced it with the glass for a better view of the movement. When our regard stops at the skeleton movement, it is like magic. Time becomes suspended as if by enchantment.’1
Or perhaps you prefer the Harry Winston Opus 3, a ‘symphony’ designed by Vianney Halter, just 14 when he joined the Watchmaking School of Paris in 1977, a digital piece inspired by a calculator. It took two years just to construct the prototype, with 250 components, including 10 stacked and overlapping discs, 47 numerals rotating on their axes at different speeds, displaying the hours, minutes, seconds and date through six different windows or ‘portholes’, two rows of three, a blue number displaying the hours in the upper windows on the left and right, black for the digital minute in the lower windows also on the left and right, a red number for the date in the centre column read vertically. A masterpiece of timekeeping, but also ugly and cumbersome and obviously unnecessary, in an edition of 25. Price on request. (About one million pounds.)
I also received an email from a French atelier, Louis Moinet, established 1806, and inventor of the chronograph (or stopwatch). LM’s new watch was also an old watch, boasting a dial made from fossilised dinosaur bone. This Jurassic Watch, all mod cons inside, was between 145 and 200 million years old on the outside. The dinosaur in question was discovered in North America and has been authenticated by a dinosaur museum in Switzerland. It’s a diplodocus, one of those with a long neck and tail, and also a herbivore, which would please the horological vegetarians.
This was another reason for buying a watch: the ability to wear something historic. Modern marketing does well when attached to narrative storytelling. These days, even eggs in supermarkets have a story to them – where they were hatched, the proud heritage of the chicken. In horology, the modern masters of this narrative are the owners of a company called Bremont, based in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. Bremont has made a name for itself by including tiny pieces of historic objects within its timepieces and then advertising the shit out of them with a narrative description worthy of Robert Harris.
Formed in 2002 by two Englishmen (Nick and Giles English), the company has its roots in beautifully crafted aviation pieces, but it adores a bit of derring-do too. So for its Codebreaker chronograph of 2013 it featured three elements of the Bletchley Park story in one model: the crown held a bit of pinewood from Hut 6 (which concentrated on cracking Enigma machine ciphers). The case, in either stainless steel or rose gold, featured a section of a Bletchley Park computer punch card on its side. And the back of the case incorporated a thin slice of a rotor from an original German Enigma machine. Starting at around £12,000.
Reflecting an earlier period of British ingenuity, another watch features a tiny section of timber and copper that fought the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 (the English brothers pounced on Nelson’s HMS Victory during routine maintenance and did a deal with the owners). And then there is the Bremont watch incorporating a bit of stuff that changed our lives – the first heavier-than-air powered flight by the Wright brothers on 17 December 1903. Orville and Wilbur flew four times in one day near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and one may have assumed that their plane, the Wright Flyer, would soon become one of those untouchable historical objects from which no part could ever be sold or recycled, like the HMS Victory or Hut 6 at Bletchley. But no. Until 1948, the Wright Flyer was on display at London’s Science Museum, and it now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.2 But sometime between the first flight and the first public display in 1916, the bro
thers removed the muslin covering the spruce wings and replaced it with other, fresher, cleaner material. Bremont bought the original muslin from the Wright brothers’ family, and now here it is on the back of the Bremont Wright Flyer Limited Edition, a tiny speck of woven fabric under glass. They are very beautiful objects, grand history on one’s wrist, and, writing as a Timex owner, I would actually like one of those watches. But not, perhaps, for £29,500.
And then there is heritage, advertising’s guilt card. Centuries of craftsmen have ruined their eyes making these objects for you, so surely you, a person of taste, are not going to abandon this fine tradition now by buying something from the Argos catalogue. We have been making these priceless timepieces here in a tiny workshop in Berne since before the moon began, so surely it’s time you added one to your collection. And then there is Breguet, or ‘Breguet depuis 1775’, where the quotes in its lush, café-crème-coloured advertisements trade off its literary connections. ‘A dandy on the boulevards . . . strolling at leisure until his Breguet, ever vigilant, reminds him it is midday.’ (Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 1829.) Or: ‘He drew out the most delicious watch Breguet had ever made. Fancy, it is eleven o’clock, I was up early.’ (Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, 1833.) These days we’d call it product placement: ‘A fine gold chain hung from the pocket of his waistcoat, where a flat watch could just be seen. He toyed with the “ratchet” key which Breguet had just invented.’ (Honoré de Balzac, La Rabouilleuse, 1842.) In quoting the masters (there are other ads in the series: Stendhal, Thackeray, Dumas, Hugo), and listing its most famous customers (Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon Bonaparte, Churchill), the brand tempts us by association: a timeline of the distinguished to which we may add our notch, given the dosh.
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