Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny, & Perpetual Motion

by John Biggs

  Salomons’ crowning achievement as a collector came on the day, when, as he was hurrying along Regents Street to get out of a downpour, he passed a jeweler’s where he had only ever seen modern timepieces. There in the window, nestled on felt, lay a “curious-looking watch differing from the usual display.” A small card next to it identified it as the “Marie-Antoinette,” and there was no price.

  “Could I afford this?” he asked himself, and, the rain worsening, he ran the rest of the way home, the watch hanging heavy in his mind. Realizing that such a unique piece wouldn’t “stop long in that window if the rain ceased,” he put on his Wellingtons and weatherproofing and went back to the shop, the bell jingling as he brushed the rain from his coat and folded his umbrella.

  The proprietor was a long-time admirer of Breguet who had taken the watch on commission and only just placed it in the window for sale. After settling on a price with Salomons, something in the hundreds, the proprietor claimed that he would have to consult with the owner; he said that he would send word by ten o’clock the next morning whether the agreed-upon price would be acceptable.

  Salomons spent a long night thinking about the watch and at 9:30 the next morning the bell rang at his Grosvenor Street home. It was the red-faced proprietor, carrying a small parcel.

  “The price, if advanced £50 pounds, would be accepted,” he said, after setting down the parcel.

  “I could not quarrel over the extra £50, so I gave a cheque and kept the watch,” wrote Salomons. “It turned out to be a good purchase, judging from seducing offers made to me later on to part with it.”115

  Just when Salomons was laying the foundation of his Breguet collection, Baron R.M. de Klinckowstrom, the great-uncle of Axel Fersen, was destroying whatever hope scholars still harbored that they might learn the true nature of the relationship between Fersen and the former Queen of France. In 1878, Klinckowstrom published Le Comte de Fersen et la cour de France, a collection of excerpts from his great-nephew’s letters and diaries. But Klinckowstrom elided a number of important passages, including almost all of those that detailed the relationship. Later, on his deathbed, Klinckowstrom had a servant build a fire and burn the original letters, one by one. As a historian notes, “for this Baron von Klinckowstrom must be condemned without reprieve.”116

  From the pyre of Fersen’s papers rose vaporous plumes of hearsay and speculation. The simplest questions remained open to debate: Was Fersen the queen’s lover? Was he the man who ordered the 160 for her?

  The story linking her and Fersen to the 160 had spread by word of mouth. There is no clear entry in Breguet’s ledgers specifying that the 160 was “pour la Reine,” although many similar notations do appear in his ledgers for watches for the king and queen. Because the Breguet workshop was ransacked during the Revolution, little documentation outlived the era. All that is known is that Breguet continued to work on the watch long after commercial prudence dictated that he should have stopped, and long after he had reason to expect any recompense from the original commissioner. The story, as passed down through the Breguet family, and various historians, was simply that an “Officer of the Queen’s Guard” had commissioned the piece. But the only known officer who would have had the impetus to commission something so “spectacular” was Fersen. Fersen’s family, it should be noted, continued to buy Breguet’s watches as the nineteenth century progressed.

  Over the years, occasional publications would rekindle public discussion of the relationship. In 1902, the Klinckowstrom book was published in English. In 1928, a previously unknown, revealing letter between Marie and Fersen was discovered. In 1930, a Swedish historian Anna Soderhjelm produced fresh revelations about the relationship, and three years later another letter was discovered in the Swedish Royal Archives, in which Baron von Taube, writing to Gustav III in 1779, described how Fersen and Marie were conspicuously spending time together.

  By the time that Salomons started to amass his watch collection, the company that bore Breguet’s name had branched out considerably, a testament to the breadth of the man’s interest and innovation.

  Breguet’s contributions to science were difficult to exaggerate. He had brought a new precision first to the lives of royalty and then to the lives of common men. Scientists, astronomers, and sailors were indebted to his quest for accuracy, and his advances — either wholly invented or adopted from others and improved — had become standard in mechanical wristwatches. The same ruby pinions and cylinders, the same polishing techniques and beveling, and the same tricks to reduce shock and ensure even running would remain fixtures in even the most modern mechanical watches.

  He had perfected the art of metallurgy and metal engineering, understanding the intrinsic values of various metals set to various purposes. To design he had introduced a neoclassical style that was a striking admixture of the very old and the very new. His watches, their faces white as snow and the blued hands as clear and bright as a distant flare over a calm sea, anticipated the drive toward elegance and legibility by centuries.

  With his advances in miniaturization, Breguet had laid the groundwork for precision engineering. Clockwork, of which he was the foremost avatar, would form the basis of robotics, and metamorphose into telegraph machines, bomb timers, and control systems for airplane engines. Breguet’s experiments in measuring speed would pave the way for avionics. His mechanical process of “getting” and “putting” data from the movement to the face would make possible such later creations as Babbage’s Difference Engine, forerunner of the computer. Breguet’s secret signature, in short, would be indelibly stamped on the twentieth century.

  His descendants, in particular his grandson Louis-Clement, broadened his legacy in other ways. Even as the firm continued to cater to the likes of the Rothschild family, Napoleon III, and Queen Victoria, and expanded to more distant markets, it extended its technological horizons. Louis-Clement’s gifts in science were equal to his grandfather’s, and he continued the tradition of watchmaking ingenuity. He invented a number of electric clocks and devised a tuning-fork to replace the spring balance in chronometers, a precursor to quartz technology. He also built a master/slave clock system, which allowed clocks in a building to be set from a central location, and created an inking thermometer for the University of Kazan in Russia that could record the daily changes of temperature in that frigid region. His system of mirrors, designed for Dominique Francois Arago, helped that scientist measure the speed of light.

  Like his own father, who had invented an aerial telegraph that used a series of flags to send messages across long distances, Louis Clement, too, pioneered several advances in telegraphy, as well as the first speed and braking control system for trains. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the firm began producing telegraphs, including a unique alphabetical model that could send letters down the wire without relying on specially trained Morse code operators. The Breguet firm also brought Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone to France, dedicating new workshops to the company’s new passion, electricity and telecommunications.

  By the end of the century, the Breguet company had left the hands of the Breguet family completely and been turned over to workshop foreman Edward Brown who maintained the focus on scientific tools and communications systems.

  Through all this, David Lionel Salomons did more than anyone to maintain the allure of the Breguet name. In 1921, he published Breguet 1747-1823, a book exploring Breguet’s entire career and output, establishing the first detailed record of all of the watches Breguet handled, including the 160. Two years later, on the centennial of the watchmaker’s death, Salomons exhibited his private collection at the Palais Galliera in Paris, uttering his famous epigram that “to carry a fine Breguet watch is to feel that you have the brains of a genius in your pocket.” Another two years after that, on April 19, 1925, Salomons died, and his Breguets began their unlikely peregrination to Palestine.

  The field of watchmaking, even before Breguet’s death, had begun to move away from him. By 1800, wha
t had once been the province of the wealthy and powerful had been democratized, and the industry’s center of gravity had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. There were hundreds of watch companies in the United States, situated mostly along major rail lines in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. Watches were integral to keeping trains running on time, and manufacturing centers proliferated around railroads’ farm hubs. These watchmakers created multiple styles and versions of each timepiece, from the dollar watch — an unadjusted, untrustworthy hunk of tin for the average buyer — to the highly precise railman’s watch.

  The move toward mass production, which would eventually overturn the old methods of the Swiss masters, had begun with an American named Eli Terry. Born in 1772 in East Windsor, Connecticut, as a teenager Terry apprenticed with a local maker of grandfather clocks and with a maker of more sophisticated clocks who taught him engraving and passed on some of the engineering knowledge required to fashion complications.

  In 1793, Terry moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts, to start his own business, but the expensive, then-standard brass clocks limited the size of his potential market, and Terry spent much of his time engraving, at times repairing spectacles to make ends meet. He had begun experimenting with wooden clocks, however, and their material costs were lower, enabling Terry to charge less for them. Soon he was focused entirely on making wooden watches, and had established himself as a profitable local watchmaker. He had other innovative and cost-saving ideas, such as using unskilled workers to cut out cogs roughly (with a skilled clockmaker doing only the finishing work) and using water, rather than people, to power clock-making tools. By 1800, Terry had two apprentices, his shop could work on about twenty clocks at once, and he employed travelling salesmen to hawk his wares.

  In 1807, his approach to mass-producing clocks caught the eye of a pair of merchants in Waterbury, who placed an order for four thousand clocks from Terry, this at a time when an order of even five hundred clocks in only three years seemed fantastical. Terry, seeing this as his chance to prove the worth of his technique, sold his old shop to an apprentice, bought a gristmill, and with two new partners busied himself fulfilling the contract. He spent the next two years converting his gristmill into a state-of-the-art facility, with water-powered saws, lathes, and planes, which could churn out identical, interchangeable clock parts that required no finishing work. Within a year of starting production, Terry’s factory had fulfilled the contract, and ushered in an era when timekeeping was available to everyone, everywhere. Clocks which had sold for between $18 and $70 just a few years before were now going for $5.

  For the first time, poor farmers could afford a timepiece. In 1814, Terry patented the thirty-hour Shelf Clock, a high quality piece that maintained acceptable accuracy and only had to be wound once a day. These clocks sold for around fifteen dollars, and were instantly popular. Travelling salesmen would buy a number in bulk and let farmers try the clocks for a month without payment, pioneering the thirty-day, no-money-down guarantee. These rural customers invariably fell in love with their clocks, and salesmen rarely had to take a clock away with them when they returned for payment. By 1820, Terry was making ten thousand clocks a year, and Connecticut was full of manufacturers copying his techniques.

  In 1837, Chauncey Jerome, a longtime employee of Terry’s, perfected a sheet brass clock that could be manufactured for only $6 and sold for as little as $10, only marginally more expensive than wooden clocks but many times more accurate. They instantly upset the clock market.

  Eli Terry had helped to create what would be known as “the American system” of manufacturing. Over the next sixty years, the American watch industry would become so dominant that a Swiss watchmaker who took an unadjusted watch from the 1893 World’s Fair back to Switzerland and tested it against his country’s best movements would see one of the cheapest, least complicated U.S. watches beat one of the best Swiss ones.

  The Swiss watch, meanwhile, struggled to remain relevant. By the mid-nineteenth century, with the juggernaut of mass production bearing down on the cottage industries of France and Switzerland, even the venerable firm of Breguet et Fils had to find new avenues for business. In time, prices would fall to $1 for a standard pocket watch, which none of the Swiss manufacturers would be able to match until the twentieth century.

  In the most rarefied circles, of course, there continued to be those chronophiles who appreciated fine mechanical watches. In 1902, a great “jewel” rush began, with manufacturers boasting sometimes over one hundred “jewels” (really rubies) that were arrayed all over the movement, even in positions that were non-functional. To an untrained buyer, after all, more jewels were better, and so watchmakers boasted of comically large numbers of jewels on the face of their over-engineered watches.117

  A collectors’ arms race between two post-WWI financial titans yielded two extremely complicated watches. The first, the Packard Complication, was made by Patek Philippe for the automobile magnate James Ward Packard, a bespectacled watch lover who was in desperate, if seemingly friendly, competition with a banker in New York, Henry Graves. The Packard Complication, completed in 1927, was known as the most complex watch in the world and came with a star chart of the skies above Packard’s Ohio home. In 1933, Graves commissioned a watch, also from Patek Philippe, with twenty-four complications, eclipsing Packard’s record-breaking watch. The Graves would be unsurpassed for another half century, until Patek Philippe produced the Caliber 89, with thirty-three complications.

  But such watches were the exception. The years following the creation of the Graves Complication were the Steel Age of Swiss watchmaking. The simple military-issue A-11 watches worn by American G.I.s in World War II popularized the wristwatch, and the large and complicated was replaced by the thin and delicate. Gold, once the standard material for most watches, gave way to stainless steel or chromed or electroplated metals. Switzerland led these decades with typical Alpine aplomb, maintaining the status quo without exploration or creativity.

  The watch had become as romantic and well-constructed as a weed trimmer. It was a tool, something that eased the burden of watching the clock at work or school, and it made an excellent coming-of-age or retirement present. The most prolific and best watch houses stayed in business by supplying military timepieces to armies, navies, and the burgeoning air forces of continental Europe and England. Panerai, which had made its name in 1935 when it created some of the first diving watches using Rolex movements and cases, added a patented crown-locking device during WWII and supplied frogmen with diving instruments, compasses, depth gauges, and watches, before shuttering in about 1950.

  The little Swiss watchmaker had become an outdated fiction, perpetuated to convey quality and to goose sales. Why pay a faceless drone in a Hamilton factory in Illinois when you could tap the ingenuity of a gnomic watchmaker in the Jura mountains? Most watches bought in America were American-made and relatively cheap, so Swiss exporters like Omega and Rolex — supremely popular worldwide brands even in the 1950s and 1960s — had to offer an air of luxury and exclusivity to justify their price tags.

  The original Apollo astronauts went into space with Omega Speedmasters on their wrists. These iconic watches were chosen because they were acceptably legible, with white hands and numerals on a black face, and they could be hand-wound — an important consideration because automatic watches’ internal weights would be useless in weightless conditions. When Buzz Aldrin returned to earth, he complained mightily about the watches, saying they were unreadable and the buttons too small, but henceforth the Omega company would boast of its connection to spaceflight every five years or so on the anniversary of the Speedmaster’s historic tumble through the stratosphere, attempting to position a humble device — akin to a protractor or slide rule — as a mythic tool of great men.

  Then crisis arrived. On December 25, 1969, the Japanese watch company Seiko released the 35 SQ Astron, the world’s first analog quartz watch. It had long been observed that a quartz crystal, exposed to an electric current, wou
ld vibrate at a constant and predictable rate, and that this property could be exploited to keep time. Quartz movements were more accurate than their mechanical counterparts and had the added advantage of being impervious to temperature changes. Quartz clocks had been made since the 1920s, but their bulk and delicacy limited them primarily to use as precision instruments in laboratories. It had taken Seiko more than ten years of R&D to bring its idea to market, but on the last Christmas of the 1960s, it did so.

  The Astron’s ticking seconds hand was a revelation for many — that kind of rhythmic movement was hard enough to engineer in mechanical watches — but the watch cost a daunting $1,250, about the same as a Toyota Corolla at the time. It was, however, the future. After a limited run of one hundred pieces, Seiko perfected the watch and began to sell improved models using integrated circuits. Prices dropped precipitously. Within seven years, Texas Instruments would debut the first quartz watch priced under $20.

  The world flocked to quartz. These timepieces, so much simpler to make without the endless gears and cogs of mechanicals, could be stamped out in seconds, and thousands of them flooded the bars and clubs of the 1970s.

  The old watch companies were dinosaurs, and Swiss watch sales dried up. The devastation wrought by quartz on the traditional mechanical watchmakers was similar to what would happen to cameras, as consumers abandoned their high-end Leica shooters and low-end Nikons, not to mention the rolls of film that fed a thousand sprockets when digital cameras were introduced.

  Swiss watchmakers could have adapted. Around 1970, as the first mass-produced quartz watch movements began flowing into Switzerland, its artisans played an important role in reducing the size and complexity of the movements for placement into wristwatch cases. But whether due to a lack of foresight or a distaste for all things electronic, most Swiss manufacturers ignored the technology. They knew dials and gears, not transistors and batteries. The quartz peddlers soon left Europe for Japan, and stayed there.