Working nine to five
In the traditional artisan watch and clockmaking world, the Industrial Revolution triggered what the process economist Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”.
For watch and clockmakers, who had largely operated as small workshops creating tiny numbers of valuable pieces the industry was about to be turned on its head. Improvements in manufacturing techniques and materials knowledge increased production quantity and drove the cost of watches down. Technological advances, like those made by John Harrison when he invented the marine chronometer, a timekeeper so accurate it could be used to calculate longitude at sea, turned the watch from being a bauble for the elite into a serious piece of scientific equipment.
Historian EP Thompson poetically described the role of the watch in 18th-Century Britain as “the small instrument which regulated the new rhythms of industrial life“. This combination – our increasingly time-kept world meeting wider personal timekeeper ownership – created conflict. Greater reliance on shift work in factories, and the exploitation of the working poor had made opportunities for unscrupulous factory masters to eke as much work as possible out of their staff.
An account by one 19th Century factory worker in Dundee, Scotland, described working conditions: “In reality there were no regular hours: masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression. Though it is known among the hands, all were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss anyone who presumed to know too much about the science of horology.”
It could be argued that the Industrial Revolution can be blamed for the beginning of the end of our work/life balance. It was the moment when time went from being our useful ally to a form of social control.
Disposable time
The mechanical watch would reign supreme until the mid-20th Century when a new form of technology threatened to change it all. On Christmas Day 1969, Japanese watchmakers Seiko released the Astron, the world’s first commercial quartz watch.
Advertised as being 100 times more accurate than its mechanical rivals, the Astron wasn’t cheap – only 100 were made initially and sold at Y450,000 (around £10,000/$12,000 in today’s money) – but that didn’t remain the case for long. Through massive investment in technology, streamlining production and increasing automation, quartz watch movements became more and more affordable. Today, you can buy a perfectly functioning quartz watch movement for a handful of change.
The traditional watch-making industry that was by this time blooming in Switzerland was not prepared. They were slower to invest in new technology and increasingly had to source parts from overseas. This, combined with the rising value of the Swiss franc, priced them out of the low-value market. By the early 1980s, their industry was in a catastrophic state of decline with mass redundancies and hundreds of companies collapsing, causing recessions in the old watchmaking world and what is referred to as “the quartz crisis”.
