Horological Meandering

Marcus Hanke
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Dear Faisal, I understand your feelings ...

First of all, let me thank you for your kind compliment, which I certainly do not deserve. My English is far from what I would like it to be, my sentences are long and clumsy, my grammar is bad. What I could easily express in my mother-language German, becomes a difficult jigsaw-puzzle of words and phrases when I try to do the same in English. I will never reach the level of most others here, which sometimes depresses me. I fear my plans to write a best-selling novel in English, about an insane watchmaker who surrounds himself with half-intelligent automatons full of wheels and levers will never be realised ..... by the way, I fear that idea is nowhere near new as well ....

Regarding your feelings about the "big companies": I understand you, and to a certain extent share your emotions. However, please do not dismiss the "giants" entirely as blood-thirsty profit-hunters. In fact, without them, without Rolex, Breitling, the Swatch Group and the others, the whole industry would be dead already. They offer the space for the independents and small, family-owned companies to dwell in. The latter depend on the infrastructure of suppliers, think-tanks, specialsts, and the industrial background of the "big ones". There is no independent watchmaker who is able to produce a series of timepieces on which he makes everything himself: his own wheels, his own springs, his own rubies, gaskets, sapphire crystals, crowns, screws, cases, dials, hands, buckles, straps.Even if he could, the costs of these components, produced in tiny series only, would be so astronomically high, that no serious economic calculation could be done for the price of such an individual timepiece. All those watchmakers depend on suppliers specialised on the production of crystals, cases, dials, and so on. However, these specialists could never survive but on the tiny numbers ordered by the independents. They need the large orders from the "giants", and only these offer enough profit that can be invested into research and new materials.

There is a simple evidence confirming my assumption: Look at Japan, a country where the traditional division of labour in the watch industry never existed. There never were legions of small and large companies specialised on making dials, cases, crystals, straps. Consequently, whoever wanted to build watches had to make all these components himself. And the only way to finance this concentration reasonably is to start full-scale mass production. Thus it is somewhat an irony that the only two watch producers who really fulfil even the strictest definition of "in-house" watch manufacturing are also the ones with the highest production figures: Seiko and Citizen. If you press the "Start"-Button of their production lines, immediately followed by "Stop", you are likely to have produced already more watches than the entire annual production of our cherished independents or family-owned brands.

The industry is complicated, and we have to be thankful for all those buying watches from the "giants". They make it possible that we can enjoy the dynamics and horological richness of our "dwarves".

Best regards,
Marcus