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

by John Biggs

  The Swiss clung desperately to their past greatness, and an entire industry arose offering COSC-certified watches that had been tested extensively for accuracy over a long period of time. The COSC designation enabled some watchmakers, like Breitling, to charge more for their watches. But it did nothing to restore Switzerland as the center of watchmaking.

  In 1972, a Swiss company released a watch that would eventually carve a path back to relevance for the industry. For years, watch luxury had meant gold; steel was the pedestrian metal reserved for low-end bar mitzvah gifts. But the porthole-shaped Royal Oak, from Audemars Piguet, was a luxury quartz steel watch for the polo set. Soon Breitling and Rolex followed suit, charging $8,000 and up for steel watches, which once would have been unthinkable. In the go-go 1980s, the trend took off, and Swiss watchmakers, along with mechanical watches, experienced a renaissance by embracing a new sense of mass luxury, adding odd colors and lots of shine to their designs.

  Panerai, closed decades earlier, reformed in 1993 to capture those consumers nostalgic for military-grade gear, then reinvented itself again as a luxury watchmaker to ride the big watch boom of the late 1990s and 2000s, when huge, pie-plate-sized watches came into vogue. Most of the best known companies, including Breguet, followed the same pattern, emerging from years on life support to satiate a new breed of uber-rich, ultra-fashionable collector. After years spent adorning the wrists of pilots, scientists, and astronauts, watches suddenly colonized the fashion ghetto, and houses like Breguet shrewdly adapted, mastering the fine line between haute couture and haute technology.

  But at the time of the Mayer museum’s founding in Jerusalem, watchmaking as an art was still in a kind of dark age. David Lionel Salomons had willed the watches to his daughter, Vera, a stern, adventurous woman who trained as a nurse, got a divorce from her soldier husband, and spent much of her life travelling the globe, returning again and again to Jerusalem. The year her father died, she set about founding a home for the elderly there, along with housing for the blind and for immigrants.

  After World War II, Vera turned her attention to fostering religious tolerance in the new state of Israel, and she began studying Islamic art and history and pursuing various eccentric projects. In one, she tried to buy the Wailing Wall for the Jews from a Muslim property trust for £100,000. In the course of her studies, she befriended a professor, Leon Arie Mayer, at the Hebrew University. The precise nature of their relationship isn’t clear — it was rumored in Jerusalem that the two were lovers — but it was sufficiently close that Vera ultimately founded the L.A. Mayer Memorial Museum of Islamic Art. Moving between Israel, Switzerland, and Ireland in her final years, she died in 1969, at age eighty-one, never seeing the finished museum, which wouldn’t open until 1974. The watches her father had left her, minus sixty-five pieces she had sold at Christie’s in 1964, all went to the museum. Foremost among them was the Marie-Antoinette, which would rest there undisturbed until 1983.

  Chapter 15

  Geneva

  The pre-holiday lights of modern Geneva in November fade into fog as you climb up the mountains into the towns that made this country’s fortune. Sunlight is scarce and when it does appear it’s bright and flat and comes in at a low angle over the city spires. Even in such weather, you can make it around the tip of the lake, through verdant, well-tended, and advertisement-free suburbs, and up into the mountains in forty minutes, a trip that would have taken Abraham-Louis Breguet days. The summers here are given over to the dairy farming that have made Swiss cheese and chocolate famous, but in the cold winter evenings the farmers, for centuries, stayed inside filing cogs and gears by candlelight, then selling them to merchants in the city.

  Some of those selfsame farm families still live in the hills, and their children have abandoned the plow to join the watch industry. The skills generated by decades of piecework were passed down from grandparents to grandchildren, and the resulting concentration of watchmakers in this region is startling. While not everyone is a master, high in these mountains, everyone has brass, gold, and steel flowing in their veins. One watchmaker told me that in Switzerland a good student could either go into banking or watchmaking. There were no other jobs worth having.

  The road into the mountains winds through switchbacks that open onto wide vistas of stone and pine and rich farmland. Grapevines scroll up the hills like veins of gold, while dark brown cows meander in the grass. Here, in the towns of the Vallée de Joux, is the world’s greatest concentration of factories of the world’s leading watchmakers, including Patek Phillipe, Audemars Piguet, and Jaeger-LeCoultre. The Hotel des Horlogers, with its Salon de Chronographes dining room, is one of the few luxury hotels in the area and was renovated in 2008 by Audemars Piguet to supply the horologists of the Vallée and their well-heeled clients with a fine meal to go with their fine watches. The towns here are still quite small, but they are economic powerhouses. Like car lovers travelling to Germany to pick up their sports coupes fresh off the assembly line, rich watch fanatics make pilgrimages to their favorite ateliers to pick up their latest multi-thousand dollar purchases.

  Next to a public park on the shore of Lac de Joux, there is a building — all stucco and bright, clean glass — that looks as if it should house a European tech start-up rather than the logistical arm of a luxury Swiss watch company. A giant, complicated watch above the front door announces that you have arrived at the corporate headquarters of Breguet.

  A short drive onward, you come to the company’s factory and training academy. The complex looks like an upscale office park. Inside, the lobby is empty and unremarkable, save for a 100x-scale replica of Breguet’s No. 5 watch, and a comely, if curt, receptionist who opens the mail and guards the inner sanctum.

  Through a set of security doors is a room far removed from the workshop of the company’s founder, with its smudged gas lamps and lector reading the news of the day. Here, instead, you find something that resembles nothing so much as a microtechnology lab. The ziplock floor, plastic and seamless, is sealed against spills. The walls and work surfaces are spotless. No oil or grease mars the machines; even the heaviest presses and drills are hand-cleaned nightly. About two-hundred workers pad around in clean, white work smocks, white caps, and slip-on shoes. Every door is security-locked, and a collection of blue booties — for guests and inspectors popping in for a peek — sits by the entrance door to prevent the introduction of dirt and dust into the factory’s clean rooms.

  While many steps in the watchmaking process, such as braising metal, filing, and cutting gears and hands, are now automated, the machines are a mix of old and new. Some were made at the turn of the nineteenth century, and even many of the younger machines, excluding the brand new laser-guided milling machines and automated lamps and movement holders, date from the 1950s.

  Many original guilloche engines are still in use today. One engineer in the 1860s found the older machines to be far superior, noting one to be “a singularly elegant piece of mechanism, and unlike earlier engraving machines.”118 Once a watchmaker found a good tool, he rarely gave it up, as evidenced by the nineteenth-century equipment still used in Breguet’s modern-day headquarters in the Jura mountains.

  The factory has its share of huge machines and hissing presses, and is ugly in an industrial way, but the company has little problem attracting young people. They come from the surrounding farms, happy to spend three years in post-high school apprenticeships before they can take up a file or a screw. They are drawn by the beauty and prestige of the product, and the chance to work in the tradition of their parents and ancestors.

  In a modern Breguet watch, the manufacturing steps are parceled out among between ten and twenty individual watchmakers, each of whom has one specific task. For some workers, the repetitive nature of the job is a kind of zen. One especially competent screw polisher, promoted to manager, asked to go back to her old job, which she found more meaningful. Although just a cog in the watchmaking machinery, she loved the small, precise part she played.


  Every watch-in-progress makes its journey through the factory, from start to finish, on its own small plastic tray. To ferret out errors in the system, a detailed list of steps taken, by which watchmaker, is kept in computer files and in handwritten logs. Each watch is given a number — usually four or five digits — and this number follows the watch from stamping to final steps.

  The watch movement begins with an ebauche. The blank factory, on the first floor, is staffed by experts who punch out blank after blank from sheets of brass or steel that come on long spools and are fed first into a cutter, then into a machine that pops tiny holes in each blank for the pinions and cams, and finally into a machine that presses out indentations for the wheels. The blanks are then washed and polished in a bath of nutshells or corn, washed again, and inspected for damage.

  Every part of the watch, at every step of its creation, is measured and remeasured to ensure accuracy to within one micron and forestall timing issues further along in the process. Supervisors sit in a glassed-in area near the front of each workshop and examine the finished products every night before the watchmakers go home. Any problems are immediately called out, and the watch is either sent back down the manufacturing ladder or recycled completely. This time-consuming inspection process limits the company to making about forty thousand watches a year.

  The factory’s second floor is dedicated to the decoration of the larger pieces of the movement. As these parts are cut or stamped out of steel, gold, or brass, they are finely beveled, polished with a piece of wood covered in paper, and carefully engraved with a guilloché or burnishing engine. Burnishing engines delicately brush swirling dots (known as “pearlage”) or parallel lines (known as Geneva Stripes) into the back of a nearly finished blank. Guilloché engines, as in Breguet’s time, ornament the watch face with checkerboard patterns, long dashes, or odd rose-shaped spirals. They require an infallibly steady hand, and contemporary Breguet engravers use microscopes to see where they are touching the metal surface. Original guilloché machines are in short supply nowadays, and master watchmakers must comb swap meets and flea markets to find parts.

  Meanwhile, downstairs, the movement proceeds to the assembly room, where each watchmaker, elbows resting in two designated spots on his bench, laboriously uses tweezers to place pieces smaller than a grain of sand into the nearly finished movement. He refers to a book, with a detailed diagram to ensure uniformity among the watches, as he places each piece and screws it down. Every room has a sticky entryway carpet made by 3M to catch dirt and stray pieces that fall to the ground during the course of the day, and apprentices dig through detritus to find other pieces that may have fallen.

  When a movement is completed, it is tested using a machine that photographs the pallets and pallet wheel. If the pallets are touching the watch incorrectly, the watchmaker pulls it out of the machine and delicately pushes the pallets back into place — a job akin to checking the hinge on a locket, by eye, using only a rudimentary automated measuring device and tweezers. Modern techniques and materials have all but eradicated the traditional culprits in watchmaking error — friction and uneven gravity — but this late-stage scrutiny provides another safeguard for accuracy.

  Finally, in the assembly room, the movements are fitted into cases, and buttons, dials, and hands are added. Most Breguet watches bear their serial numbers on their dials, and a separate station uses an inking machine to print the number onto the face manually. First, the printer tests the striking surface a few times by placing a plastic sheet over the dial and applying the ink. Once it’s in the right place, the sheet is removed and a tiny number is printed on the dial. This is the watch’s DNA, and when it is sold, the number, along with a customer’s personal information, will be recorded in the Breguet library in Paris, taking its place alongside such past customers as Napoleon and Churchill.

  The watchmakers then fire and apply the Breguet blued hands and close the case. A master watchmaker performs a final inspection, a strap is added, and the watch is shipped out in a hardwood box to a shop where it will wait until someone of means comes along and swoops it up. Each modern Breguet, in other words, goes through an accelerated version of the process used by Abraham-Louis at the turn of the nineteenth century.

  Starting in 2006, as the rest of the factory went about this exacting work, a secret project was under way in a small workshop in the building’s basement. There, a group of five dedicated watchmakers whose skills with metal far surpassed even the finest engravers and millwrights in the factory above were consumed with a single task. They were re-creating the Marie-Antoinette watch.

  In the 1990s, luxury mechanical watches had come back into vogue in a big way. Rolex, once the only name that came to mind when one thought of high-end watches, was now joined by relative upstarts like Panerai, Omega, and Breitling, in addition to the more venerable firms dating back centuries. $14,000 for a single watch came to represent the low end. Watchmaking was back, and Breguet, founded in 1775, was newly resplendent and flush with cash. Switzerland became, once again, the watchmaking capital of the world. There was no such thing as a cheap Swiss watch. There were manufacturers who would buy Swiss parts and build the watches abroad — Russia and Hong Kong being two popular manufacturing points — and then send them back into the country for the final tweaking, enabling the watches to wear the “Swiss Made” moniker. One man, above all others, was at the center of this Swiss renaissance.

  Born on February 19, 1928 in Beirut, Lebanon, to a well-to-do Lebanese-Greek Orthodox family, Nicolas Hayek began his career as a corporate consultant tasked with turning around two Swiss watch conglomerates, the Allgemeine Schweizerische Uhrenindustrie (ASUAG) and the Société Suisse pour l’Industrie Horlogère (SSIH). Both had been founded in the early 1930s and survived for decades. Between them they owned an array of major brands, including Omega and Tissot, as well as ETA SA Manufacture Horlogère Suisse, shortened to ETA, an ebauche factory founded in Neuchâtel in 1793. ETA’s inexpensive, mass-produced Swiss movements had become industry standard, appearing in almost every watch made between the World Wars, and until quartz took over the industry, the company effectively controlled the watch market for six decades. By manufacturing mechanical and quartz watches, the company was able to limp through the crisis, but barely. ASUAG also owned Nivarox-FAR, the largest maker of hairsprings in the world. In short, these two companies were the embodiment of the Swiss watch market and were, when Hayek came along, failing.

  In later years, Hayek had the face and girth of an unabashed hedonist, with a carefully trimmed beard under a mane of white hair. Prone to wearing four or more watches at a time (for a while he wore one for each brand), he looked like a rich uncle on holiday. His hands, large and meaty, belonged to a butcher and not a fine watchmaker.

  But Hayek, who studied math and science and founded Hayek Engineering AG in 1979, was an extremely shrewd businessman. Charged with writing a report about the two conglomerates for the Japanese company Seiko, he instead recruited a group of investors, merged the nineteen smaller companies involved, and took ownership of the resulting corporation, which he named the Swatch Group. A cantankerous businessman, he quickly blew through the staid and stodgy Swiss watch business like a human tourbillon, insulting rivals and exhorting his employees – numbering 24,000 in 2009 – to greater heights. “One day a president of a Japanese company in America said to me: ‘You cannot manufacture watches. Switzerland can make cheese but not watches. Why don’t you sell Omega for four hundred million francs?’” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I told him ‘Only after I’m dead.’”119

  Hayek conceived of the new company as a manufacturer of “emotional products,” so charged with romance that they became objects of desire and nostalgia. He saw in his products a projection of the Swiss heritage. Wrapped up in the tiny metal cases of his luxury brands like Omega and Tissot were centuries of Swiss tradition. In the bright faces and wild colors of his Swatch brand he saw the fun and rebirth of a reunited Europe. He viewed watches
not as a mass-produced commodity but as heirlooms, signs of status, and a respect for tradition all rolled into something that could cost as little as $100 — in the case of a Swatch — or as much as $30 million.

  When he created the Swatch group, high-end steel watches had begun to reconquer the luxury market, but the Swiss had lost most of the lower end, a calamity in an industry that made 60% of its money on entry-level consumers. “If you are an emotional consumer product, if you lose the lower market segment, you lose everything,” Hayek told me. “Look what the British did. They decided that they didn’t want to mass-produce cars, so in America you had General Motors, and the British kept Jaguar and Aston Martin, two high-end brands. Well, in the expensive market, you do not have a way to make money anymore. If you do not control the lower market segment, you do not control the overall market.”

  The lower end of the watch industry had come to be dominated by quartz models from Japan, with movements designed by an engineer from Texas Instruments. The Swiss, in Hayek’s view, had chauvinistically rejected the American movements, to their own detriment. The Japanese, unburdened by snobbish tradition, welcomed the American-made movements and “took over the reputation of being the most accurate watches in the world, and in less than one and a half years, we had zero market share in the low end.”

  Hayek sought to reverse this trend. First, he and his team, including watchmakers Elmar Mock and Jacques Muller, created a simple quartz movement with 51 pieces instead of Japan’s 151. The goal was to reduce the possibility of failure in a quartz watch. Because they were already so accurate, the only obvious way to improve them was to make them stronger and cheaper. Muller, wondering why no one on the beach wore a watch, realized that they were stodgy and, more important, too expensive.120 The simple Swatch, with a quartz oscillator and a small actuator to move the hands, laser welded on a single circuit board, was his answer. The Swatch team would change the line once every six months, having the faces and cases designed by artists of the day (most famously, Keith Haring). The whimsical, low-end quartz watches gave Hayek an instant hit.