This post is the third in a new series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini. Find the first post here and the second here.
Some might be tempted to think that all technology that exists today is digital, but as watch people, we know that watchmakers still use their hands–their digits–to create intricate, accurate, and beautiful timepieces. As a new member in the world of horology, I’m interested in this kind of artisan labor, and as a librarian, I’m also interested in a different kind of handiwork: handwriting in old books, that shows how these books were used and loved.
One example I recently found in the HSNY archives is a note in a book published in 1824 in London, The Book of English Trades.¹ This book, which was reprinted in many editions, would have been an important resource for young people seeking to learn how to get into “the business”–any business. It contains 78 trades listed in alphabetical order, with details of what qualifications you might need for an entry level position, and helpful illustrations that would allow someone who lived before the internet to understand, say, what a printing shop looked like, or what you needed to start making straw hats for a living.
In our copy, which can be found at HSNY’s Jost Bürgi Research Library, someone has written in an uneven nineteenth-century hand, “Augusta, Harriot & Edith Perry with their Grandmamma Booth’s Affectionate Love - - Bath 1st March 1855.” The inscription shows that multiple generations of women valued and used this book for at least 30 years after its publication, including a grandmother who thought it was important enough to pass it on to her granddaughters. And they thought it was important too–on the title page “Mrs Harriot Booth Widow” (probably the Grandmamma) signed it herself, and “edith” is written underneath in what looks like a child’s handwriting.
It is important to know that this book covers a number of trades in which women played important roles in the 18th and 19th centuries, including pin-making, spinning, and confectionery. These women may have been working in one of them, although I couldn’t find any definitive evidence of who they were or where they worked.
We own this volume because it contains an entry on watchmaking, “an employment so well known as to require no description” (nonetheless meriting a six page description). The entry, which includes the engraving at right, is lively and attempts to draw in young readers with anecdotes about famed clockmakers like Thomas Tompion, who “began the exemplification of his great knowledge in the equation of time, by regulating the wheels of a jack for roasting meat” (418).
But most of the text is practical, explaining how clocks and watches work, what a watchmaker does, and what the job requires: “a light hand,” “a strong sight,” as well as some understanding of “mechanics” and “mathematics” (421). It also foreshadows the increasing mechanization of the industry, which like most others, was experiencing rapid change during what would later be known as the industrial revolution: the “invention of engines for cutting the teeth” has “reduced the expense of workmanship and time to a mere trifle in comparison to what it was before” (420).
As for the book’s owners, Augusta, Harriot, and Edith, according to the text, they could participate in watchmaking as watch chain makers, a part of the trade that “appears difficult” but is actually “easy,” according to our author, and therefore suited to women (421). The Booth women, however, clearly educated themselves about the facts of many trades in which they were not especially invited to participate. They were proud of their ownership of this book and active participants in the dawn of the industrial era in Britain.
Despite a lack of encouragement to enter the trade, women were working in watchmaking, and we have evidence of that in our library too. A hundred years after the Perry women inscribed their book, watchmaking students Marinette Golay and Liliane Bandini were taking meticulous notes in their classes on “Horlogerie, Arithmétique, and Réglage” (watch adjusting). Today we have four of their notebooks in our library.
Below, images from Marinette Golay’s notebook show that she not only took great care in copying diagrams, she also seemed to relish the process of illustrating watch parts. Her drawings are both precise and beautiful, and they use color to distinguish the different parts of a watch, making it easier to follow how repairs could be made. In the image below right, Golay, studying the balance wheel and the hairspring, illustrates the right type of screw to use (domed) so as not to deform the rim of the balance wheel.
We also have three of Bandini’s notebooks, similarly in French, and dated 1953. In her notes below, she is equally meticulous in her drawings. In the first image, she takes notes on different types of hairsprings, noting the ratios required and what type of watch they would be suitable for. In the second set of pages, she observes an example of secondary error, following changes in amplitude and rate in a watch movement over five days.
I’ve chosen to photograph notebook pages with hand-drawn diagrams because they’re visually interesting, but many more of Bandini’s pages are filled with hard math, calculations about energy and force that any working watchmaker needs to understand at a basic level. Bandini and Golay weren’t just interested in the easy part. They went all the way down to the invisible equations that underpin all the work of the hands. And since we have some of their graded exam papers, we know they were pretty good at it.
What we don’t know about Golay and Bandini is what they did after watchmaking school–whether they actually worked on watches, either servicing them or in some other context. But in our library, we certainly have evidence of how other watchmakers worked. Around the same time that Golay and Bandini were studying in Europe, an anonymous watchmaker was writing and typing in a notebook, purchased at Woolworth’s, that is now also in our collection. In this ringed binder, the owner detailed their store inventory, took notes on different watchmakers and how to repair different models, and drew diagrams of watch parts.
The image at left above shows typed instructions for jeweling watches, or replacing the bearings of a watch, usually made from rubies, which allow the gears to rotate smoothly. The notebook’s owner has carefully illustrated different types of jewels and notes how to remove them when a watch needs repairing. At right there is a hand-drawn diagram of different types of staking punches, sets of tools used for multiple purposes in watchmaking, including to join or rivet different parts of the watch together. I don’t yet know who this watchmaker was, although the notebook and other details point to an American working in the 1940s and 1950s. Even without the owner’s identity, this notebook can still provide us with detailed information about how working mid-century watchmakers set up shop, and how they studied (and still study) different models to hone their craft and repair beloved watches for future generations.
As a longtime librarian who’s new to horology, I’ve already learned so much about watchmaking from this notebook and other materials in our collection. Many of our items–like this one–are unique, with only one copy in existence. People read them, wrote in them, and used them, often until they were falling apart. That’s what I find most valuable about working with this collection. It’s a privilege to preserve the words and traces of people who labored over centuries, contributing the work of their hands to the story of horology.
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¹ A different copy is available on Google books.