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

Chapter 6

The apprenticeship would have appealed to any adolescent boy. Watchmakers' lives weren't all hard work. They were lured from shop to shop with promises of riches, long weekends in the country, private clubs in which to relax, and, in one instance, a master who promised a "new hat with a gold border and a new peruke" to his new employees. They were feted, lauded, and considered singularly respectable in the pantheon of eighteenth-century professions.

Adventure, too, awaited them. Watchmakers were held for ransom by Barbary pirates so often that when travelling by ship, they wrote clauses into their contracts stating that their employer would pay for their freedom if and only if that they would not give up their watches to the captors.45 Jacques Barthelemy, the grandson of the founder of the watch house Vacheron Constantin (then called Vacheron-Chossat), found "banditry" and frontier justice to be another threat to the watchmaker. While travelling to Rome through northern Italy, he found human "arms and legs nailed to posts, as a sign to travelers that brigands had been executed there because they had committed murder." Luckily the watchmakers lost no limbs on the journey.

Dangers aside, a skilled craftsman could make a nice living, even without a full gentleman's education. Breguet's family had been nearly destitute before Tattet stepped in, and if the boy showed even a modicum of talent, he could make good money in the storefronts of London and Paris. Watchmakers typically made 20-25 Swiss francs a day, compared with 3-4 francs for the average craftsman.

The process of entering the guild was arduous, requiring seven years of apprenticeship - five as a water boy, fire tender, and, eventually, beginning watchmaker, and then two travelling from master to master to learn specific techniques including goldsmithing, plate production, and enameling. The more ambitious watchmakers went on to learn the art of complications and often were required to produce a series of complicated watches - watches with multiple features including chimes, moonphase registers, and perpetual calendars - as a final test before being afforded journeyman status. Even as journeymen, however, they were still forced to work under a supervisor who would sign and sell all of the watches in a particular shop.

A watchmaker's training included the creation of parts from whole metal. One test of watchmaking prowess asked the students prepare a miniature rod, adding facets, points, arcs, and holes to a piece of steel the size of a toothpick. This, in turn, led to the carving of hands and fine springs from pure steel, creating thinner and more brittle objects until the student could do it consistently without the aid of machines.

From the moment Abraham-Louis began his apprenticeship under Tattet's tutelage46 he took to watchmaking with unusual zeal. Even as an apprentice, it was clear that he had a flair for the scientific and talents in astronomy and mathematics as well as drafting. His hurried drawings were primitive but effective - just a few slashes on a sheet of paper often distilled extremely complex concepts - and his formal drawings were wondrously detailed. This talent for design gave him a distinct advantage. Because most watchmakers were not formally trained, an understanding of the rudiments of physics and optics was enough to turn an unschooled bench worker into a skilled craftsman and businessman. With a bit of study, the Tattets decided, young Abraham-Louis would become an excellent watch designer.

Watchmaking could be a frustrating and expensive proposition. Each individual piece came from a sheet of metal - usually brass but sometimes gold or silver - and had to be painstakingly cut out, milled, and polished. Safety systems on machines were primitive at best, and when a drill or grinder overshot the mark, an entire day's work could be ruined. The tips of the tools only barely touched the metal in most cases, nipping off thin slices of brass, silver, or gold in a rapid, repetitive motion that could best be described as a dance - a turn, a slide, a return to the start. Gears, for example, were first cut or stamped out as metal disks and then placed on another cutter that moved the disk an infinitesimally short distance to the next spot for the drill or file to come down and cut away a notch. Only a patient and delicate hand could coax the finest and most ornate of shapes out of otherwise imperfect metal. The tools employed, which are still in use today, removed just enough metal from a surface to allow for the addition of gears or jewels or the creation of beautifully engraved surfaces.