This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

*Image 1: “Le repas des singes” (“The Monkeys’ Meal”) pictured in Les Automates by Jean Prasteau (1968.)*

“Death is the ultimate complication,” declares Watanabe, the provocateur artist and inventor of the Cassius Seven, the titular “Death Watch” of Stona Fitch’s new novel. At its launch, the wristwatch’s features sound like any other that would be covered in dutiful detail by a journalist: “full-jeweled movement, titanium case, sapphire bezel.” There’s just one tiny addition: seven spinning knives that might emerge from the case to kill the wearer in an instant by severing his wrist. Oh yeah, and once you put it on, you can’t take it off.

Is it an ironic publicity stunt, a fake-out meant to embarrass the billionaire watch collectors of the world with a send-up of their irresponsible, nihilistic wealth? A postmodern joke built to raise questions about our “precarious existence” as mortal humans, which could indeed end at any moment? Or, as its inventor claims, does this watch really know the answer to the question “When will you die?” The characters in this book aren’t too sure, but they’re about to find out.

If you’re a regular consumer of watch content, you’ll enjoy the industry parody in “Death Watch,” available to peruse in our library at the Horological Society of New York (image 2 shows the book alongside some of the non-deadly watches in our current exhibit.) This deadly watch, while fictional, raises the specter of the real-life watches that have killed or maimed.

One of the most obvious classes of deadly watches is the radium dial watch. Of course, you aren’t going to die from wearing a lumed watch today, even if it’s radioactive – but people did die, or were horribly sickened, in the process of creating them.

The Radium Girls were workers at American watch factories who ingested poisonous radium paint. At work, they used their saliva to “point” the brushes, creating a fine tip to paint glowing details on dials and hands. Eventually, the radium paint caused their jaws to disintegrate, as well as other health effects, and was ultimately fatal for many.

The Radium Girls later inspired a slew of books, plays, songs, and movies, as well as a labor rights movement that helped protect future generations of workers. Here at the library, we have a few versions of their story in print, including Kate Moore’s “The Radium Girls.”

In a new graphic novel also called “Radium Girls,” which HSNY owns in French and English, artist Cy illustrates these “ghost girls” whose clothes and bodies would glow after their shifts, covered in fine radium dust. He focuses on real workers at the U.S. Radium Corporation in New Jersey in the 1920s, including Grace Fryer, whose bravery is recognized by a scholarship at HSNY (image 3). If you turn out the lights, surprise! The ghoulish glow of the book’s front cover makes the radium effect threateningly tangible (images 4 & 5).

While the effects of radium are horrifying and sad, further down on the “just creepy” portion of the scary spectrum are humanoid automata. Books in our library cover automata in detail, since, like watches, they run on mechanical clockwork. Many people find them unsettling, with their too-wide smiles and their whirring indifference to the frailty of human flesh.

Some automata are merely visually upsetting–a particular “monkey harpist” in the museum catalog “Musical Machines and Living Dolls” will haunt my dreams until I expire. Images 6 and 7 show partially disassembled human and dog figures from the book “Les Automates” by Jean Prasteau, which will probably not emerge from the computer to murder you. Other automata are unsettling for more complicated, cerebral reasons: the workshop of Pierre Jacquet-Droz, an 18th-century watchmaker known for his singing songbirds, produced automata that were capable of drawing, playing music, and writing reprogrammable sentences, and could be called early computers. (You can still see them in action today at the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History in Switzerland.) These automata, sometimes referred to as robots or androids, blur the line between human and machine, falling into the “uncanny valley” where they inspire fear and revulsion–in scientific terms, they give us the ick.

Of course human fears about almost-humans have accelerated in light of the current artificial intelligence arms race, but these worries have been around for centuries. In the 1899 story “Moxon’s Master,” for instance, a fictional chess-playing automaton, inspired by real-life examples, kills its creator after losing to him. Recently, a real chess-playing robot made headlines when it broke a little boy’s finger during a match in Moscow. The president of the Moscow Chess Federation was quoted as saying: “The robot broke the child’s finger — this, of course, is bad.” The robots are coming for us. Bad indeed.

Ending my article on the least scary end of the horror-logical spectrum, I wanted to include a few images from a new acquisition at HSNY’s ever-growing library. “Five O’Clock Tea” is a French-language Omega advertising pamphlet from 1912 whose narrative can only be described as “trippy” (see image 8). The story, by Jean Richepin, calls itself a “modern fairy tale,” and is chock-full of goblins, fairies, and gnomes. A young girl, Didi, is suffering from a mysterious fever, which can only be cured by a visit to fairyland where she will meet magic creatures.

The doctor instructs Didi to breathe in a “magic smoke” composed mainly of opium poppies and hashish (really). Didi begins to see the creatures of fairyland dancing in front of her. The doctor explains: “Because we enjoy all our progress here [in the real world]… Steam, electricity, mechanics, have their elves, their fairies, their gnomes…there has recently been a brand new gnome among the fairies…who tells them the exact time.”

In image 9, by artist Maurice Lalavi, a gnome with the body of an Omega watch appears in the sky over the ecstatic Didi, who exclaims “The new gnome of exact time, I see it!” This “gnome” has a heart that beats 18,000 times per hour, or 300 times a minute, a “metal heart, his escapement heart, his magical heart, made of wheels and springs which split time and create it by splitting it.” This advertising copy is carefully written for accuracy; an Omega watch-heart of 1912 could beat at 18,0000 vibrations per hour or 2.5 hertz, on the low end of the modern watch frequency spectrum.

The pamphlet closes with an image of the enormous Omega factory, subtitled by a production claim of 900 to 1000 watches per day (image 11). To tie in with the story, the publication also features full-color illustrations of the latest models (you can see an early wristwatch with a bracelet in image 10). Omega customers could have picked up this pamphlet at French department store Kirby, Beard & Co., a major Omega retailer at the time.

Although this is not a work intended for children, it may be designed to appeal to adults craving a little connection to the fairyland of fantasy. The subject couldn’t be more practical–watches designed for precision–but the treatment couldn’t be more whimsical. Watches are part of the world of magic, the story suggests, amalgams of artistry and engineering that seem almost supernatural. But watches are just things, really–things that can inspire your daydreams or stalk your nightmares, make you smile or sweat, leave you feeling treated or tricked.