For most of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, the world's finest watches were not made in Geneva. They were made in London. The English had, by 1700, a clear technical lead over every other watchmaking nation. The verge escapement, the cylinder escapement, the lever escapement — three of the four most important horological innovations of the period — were all English. The fourth, the detent chronometer escapement used in marine chronometers, was developed roughly simultaneously by John Arnold in London and Pierre Le Roy in Paris, though Arnold's was the design that prevailed at sea.
The three Toms
The story of London watchmaking is, more than anything, a story of three Toms. Thomas Tompion (1639–1713) is the father. Born a Bedfordshire blacksmith's son, he moved to London around 1671, set up shop in Water Lane, and within twenty years was the most respected clockmaker in Europe. He made the regulator clocks for the new Royal Observatory at Greenwich. He made watches for Charles II, William III, and Queen Anne. He is buried in Westminster Abbey — the only watchmaker ever to be — beside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
George Graham (1673–1751), Tompion's nephew by marriage and apprentice, succeeded him. Graham invented the deadbeat escapement, the cylinder escapement, and the mercury-compensated pendulum. He, too, is buried in Westminster Abbey, in the same vault as Tompion.
Thomas Mudge (1715–1794), Graham's apprentice, invented the lever escapement in 1755. It is the escapement used in essentially every mechanical watch made since. There is no other single invention in the history of horology that has had a greater effect on what a watch is.
"It was an Englishman who first proved that longitude could be measured by a watch — and the world has not been the same since." — Dava Sobel
Harrison and longitude
In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering a prize of £20,000 — roughly $4 million in modern money — to anyone who could devise a reliable method of determining longitude at sea. John Harrison, a Lincolnshire carpenter with no formal horological training, spent forty years building four progressively smaller and more accurate marine chronometers in pursuit of the prize. His H4, completed in 1759, was tested on a voyage to Jamaica in 1761–62 and lost only five seconds in 81 days. The Parliament prevaricated for another decade. King George III, eventually, intervened personally. Harrison was paid in 1773, aged eighty.
The H4 made the British Royal Navy the most accurately navigated fleet in the world. It was, in a real sense, the technology that made the British Empire possible.
The decline
British watchmaking peaked around 1820 and then, over the course of the nineteenth century, collapsed. The reasons were industrial. The Swiss and the Americans built single-factory manufacturing systems with interchangeable parts; the British clung stubbornly to the workshop apprenticeship model, with each watch hand-fitted by a single master. By 1880, the Swiss were making three times as many watches as the British. By 1914, ten times. By 1970, the British industry had ceased, for all practical purposes, to exist.
Daniels, and the renaissance
Dr George Daniels (1926–2011) was a London horologist who refused to accept the collapse. He spent his life restoring the great English pocket watches of Tompion and Graham, and from that scholarship he learned to build watches himself. He invented the co-axial escapement in 1976 — the most significant new escapement in two hundred years — and in 1974 completed the Space Travellers' Watch, the first wristwatch made entirely in Britain in more than a century. He moved to the Isle of Man, took on a single apprentice — Roger W. Smith — and trained him to continue.
Roger Smith now leads the only Isle of Man workshop still hand-making watches in the Daniels tradition — fewer than a dozen pieces a year, each requiring nearly two thousand hours of work. Around him, a generation of new British micro-brands has grown up. Bremont in Henley. Christopher Ward in Maidenhead. Garrick in Norfolk. Fears in Bristol. Anordain in Glasgow. Studio Underd0g in London. They are small. They are growing. They are, collectively, the first sustained British watchmaking ecosystem in nearly a hundred years.
It is not, and probably never will be, what it was in 1750. But for the first time in five generations, a British apprentice can learn the trade in Britain, from a British master, on a British workbench. That is, in itself, a small kind of miracle.