The Watch: Hand Work Versus Machinery

Written by Henry F. Piaget, a Swiss-born watchmaker who settled in Brooklyn in the 1830s and spent decades at the New York bench, The Watch: Hand Work Versus Machinery is a 19th-century insider’s comparison of two traditions then locked in commercial rivalry: Swiss hand-finishing and the new American factory system led by Waltham and Elgin.

Piaget writes, in his own words, “both as a native of Switzerland and as an American citizen,” and frames the book as an attempt to give each side a fair hearing. He weighs hand-finished and machine-finished movements on durability, timekeeping accuracy, and finish; surveys the principal escapements and movement types then in service; and discusses beat rates, regulation, lubrication, and routine maintenance. A historical sketch of watchmaking under both systems rounds out the text.

Originally published in New York in 1860 as The Watch: Its Construction, Its Merits and Defects, Piaget’s treatise went through several editions, with this later, expanded version retitled to foreground the hand-versus-machine debate. It remains a useful primary source on the technical state of the trade in the mid-to-late 1800s, and a window onto the cultural anxieties of watchmakers caught between the old craft and the new industry.