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Watchmaking brings together science, technology, art, industry, and the trade-in instruments suitable for measuring time.
We can distinguish three categories of timepieces:
old watchmaking describing different types of instruments called horology that can indicate old hours, such as sundials, hydraulic clocks, hourglass;
traditional watchmaking, originally entirely mechanical, an invention from the end of the 13th century known simply as watchmaking; it concerns mechanical clocks, watches, and pendulums;
current watchmaking where mechanical clockwork mechanisms are replaced by non-mechanical functions: electronic systems, IT, etc.
Instruments may be at the crossroads of different categories such as electric clocks with mechanical components and electric motorization for example.
History of watchmaking
Large-scale watch mechanisms have been installed in the bell towers of cities of the Holy Roman Empire since the Middle Ages (examples Strasbourg Cathedral in 1354; Stralsund in 1394; Bern in 1405 or Prague in 1410).
The manufacture of the first watch mechanisms powered by springs was established in the sixteenth century. These small mechanisms often included astronomical indications and landed on a table. The cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Prague were the first centers of creation and manufacture of these mechanisms. Quite quickly, other watchmaking centers appeared across Europe.
The watch industry started very early in Switzerland than in England, with multiple inventions and tricks of organization of work and massification of the production, allowing very advanced progress for the time, in technology as in the refinement of products, against the background of political power intervention. Precision, automatism, fine metalwork, made it possible to lay the groundwork for other strategic activities, in particular the navy, and other future mechanized industries. This history gradually accelerated from the eighteenth century with the appearance of a massive proto-industry in the Swiss mountains, which preceded the industrial revolution and resisted it for a long time.
Geneva watchmaking established its dominance over Europe in the second quarter of the 18th century according to historians Anne-Marie Piuz and Liliane Mottu-Weber. During the preceding thirty years, English innovations were brought by Huguenots, fleeing persecution after the Fontainebleau edict of 1685. These Protestant French speakers also shaped the history of the Indian cotton in Europe, also by conveying techniques and know-how, from one region and country to another. At the end of the 1680s, Geneva saw its population triple. The Huguenot cross, a pendant imagined in 1688 by Maystre, a goldsmith from Nîmes, is spreading. Among the refugees, watchmakers, who, due to lack of space, went north, in the Jura or the Pays de Gex at the end of the 17th century. The Geneva Clock and Enamel Museum has a small complete morbier dating from 1693, signed Isaac Golay, from the village of Le Chenet. The Pays de Vaud discovered watchmaking in the last years of the 17th century. Nyon, Rolle, Morges, Lausanne, Vevey, Moudon have around a hundred workshops that manufacture sketches for the Geneva metropolis. The first combined watchmakers appeared at the start of the 18th century. They are iron craftsmen - cutlers, gunsmiths. By reaction, from 1701, it was forbidden to train apprentices in the seigneury of Geneva, circumvention prohibited. After 1710, fifteen villages of Faucigny provided "blank movements", which it only remained to assemble.
Genevan watchmakers of origin then abandon the work of rough or rough movements, to reserve the finishing. By a series of protectionist regulations, they prevent the close establishment of competitors capable of manufacturing the complete watch. The objective is to confine this emerging industry to subcontracting work for the "Fabrique de Genève", but the Jurassic people organize their own counters. Thus, in 1735, the first floor of the house of Jehan-Jacques Blancpain already housed, for probably years, a workshop, in the form of a watchmaker's counter, about twenty kilometers north of Lake Neuchâtel. During the death in 1707 of Marie de Nemours, the Neuchâtelois chose themselves as suzerain, Frédéric-Guillaume Ier de Prusse, installed in Berlin, Protestant sovereign who protected their confession, the geographical distance allowing, in addition, a relative autonomy.
The establishment of the Jurassic arc can be adorned with the title of clockmaker from 1723, the date on which the Bernese grant a mastery to each city. From then on, they come out of anonymity more easily. Moses and I
