Time is money!

Collecting antique watches and clocks holds a particular fascination for us because they mark our special days - our rites of passage - as no other object can. Those milestones in most people's lives which have great significance to both themselves and others - graduation, 21st birthday, retirement are often marked by the gift of a watch. The sociological aspect of ritualized behaviour, or Life in its 'Ordered" sense, is manifested in the importance man has always placed on his ability to measure the passing of time, and it is this sense of holding not only a beautiful timepiece in your hand, but a part of time itself, that makes collecting them so compelling.

Reflecting simultaneously the aesthetics and technology of their time, watches making easily portable collections of societies' achievements through history. Able to be concealed on one's person, they often became a form of travelling currency in times of hardships - small valuable items are much more easily traded across frontiers than the currency of one's own country during times of war or economic depression. Above all, they are worn close to the body and become clothing, man's most intimate form of artistic expression.

As most watches are small objects, they appeal to that sense of delight we take in the human facility to miniaturise, especially if our curiosity is heightened by the presence of mystery. Watches of the sixteenth century about with "secret doors", indeed they have an almost "Jack in the Box" quality of surprise. True to the principles of the Leisure Class, multiple coverings increased the opportunities for the watchmaker to embellish his creations with exquisite pierced goldwork and precious jewels; they became more than mere timepieces, they were elevated to the rank of a work of art. The unusual shapes which were created in the late sixteenth century were completely characteristic of their times, rarely appearing in subsequent periods. Seashells, tulips and other flowers, butterfly and insect shapes offered such variety that Elizabeth I selected her watches to complement each special costume.

Lest the hedonistic pleasures of court life set the owner's soul in peril, many watches were skull-shaped, everpresent reminder that each second brought the wearer closer to death! Appropriately, the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scotts possessed just such a watch. It is mentioned in her will that she left a watch ornamented with ten diamonds and two rubies to her husband, Lord Darnley. A painting dated 1563 shows him wearing this watch and it is one of the earliest portraits to include one, Charles V of France wore a tiny watch with chimes, set in an earring. Fingering watches, rock crystal and enamelled cases all existed by the sixteenth century, but it was not until 1687 that the combination of the spiral spring and balance wheel made the minute hand possible. Humanity must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when "Back in five minutes" gave them time to breathe!

In our everyday experience the onward flow of Time seems self-evident, and the structured life we lead, supported by the existence of accurate time keepers, is rarely questioned until we are confronted with a disturbing anomaly in time perception. The Linear concept of Time in the sense that the Future becomes the Present and then the Past, is a comparatively new one. Most civilizations adopted some variation of the concept of "Cyclic Time"... a repetitive wheel of Time and Creation. Several thousand years ago the Saros cycle of repeated Solar and Lunar Eclipses was known to the Babylonians, and the sundial was also used by the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Chinese. The earliest mention of sundial is in the Book of Isaiah, "Behold I will bring again the shadow of degrees, which is gone down the sundial of Ahaz". As an ancestor of the pocket watch, portable sundials (first used in the first century A.D.) are still manufactured. Admiral Richard Byrd, a veteran of Arctic flights, carried one on the first flight to the South Pole in 1929. Byrd later built a research base on the Antarctic mainland in which he became trapped alone under snow and ice for four months in total darkness. Needless to say, his sundial could not have been much use to him. Recently exquisitely carved ivory sundials of the sixteenth century with compasses and perpetual calendars were available to collectors. Marshall McLuhan's premise that each new medium includes or documents that which it replaces hold some validity when one contemplates the visual similarities of the sundial and the clockface.

Time affects every person - there are no exceptions. The concept of "Time is Money" has caused it to become the unseen tyrant in our modern, civilized world, and we are enslaved by it. Man can, of course, create a superbly ordered existence without the benefit of mechanically measured time, but in our desire to perfect and change our lives for the sake of "progress" we have, to a large degree, relinquished some very interesting and natural talents which should be a part of us today. In a special sense we are biological clocks; our physiological function ebbing and flowing through our bodies apparently related to the dominant rhythm of the Sun's light and warmth. However, clinical tests over the past fifty years have proven that these Diurnal Rhythms are not dependant on the sun or any other environmental cycle....

We all follow a truly biological day, choosing as we often do, to ignore the natural rhythms of our body, a price must be paid. The "jet-lagged" travellers and the toiler on the factory nightshift pay the same.

It is in the psychological aspects of time perception that we find the reason for man's creation of clocks. Three major areas present themselves : awareness of the time of day, consciousness of intervals of time and finally, the extension of perception, by memory and anticipation, into the Past and Future. As history allowed individuals more freedom, the necessity to invent and own a personal timekeeper became pronounced - pocketwatches and carriage clocks being superseded by the now omnipresent wristwatch.

Together with the bicycle and the transistor radio, the watch is one of the most prized acquisitions in the emerging preliterature culture of today. Interestingly, there are seven per cent of our population who can tell the exact time instinctively, without the benefit of external clues whatsoever.

Perception of time's duration is directly related to age. Amongst the best studies of this aspect of ourselves are those of the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget who found that body temperature also plays a major role in our ability to accurately perceive the passing of time.

Children, with their warmer bodies - due to a higher metabolic rate - often complain of time "dragging", whereas the reverse seems to be true with older people whose body temperature is usually lower. Maybe the traditional gold watch given at retirement is not such an insensitive idea: nothing slows time like clock-watching.

Drugs can alter our perception of time. However, unaided by drugs in the commonplace state of dreaming, we all experience what Freud described as "The processes of the unconscious system ... not ordered by time... not modified by the passage of time... bearing no relationship to time". Beyond our eighth birthday our ability to perceive Past and Future emerges and we seem to know intuitively that time is irreversible that it is a law of the universe and before such an inexorable fact we feel powerless.

H.G. Wells' concept of Time Travel becomes an entrancing fantasy, an intellectual antidote to our innate fears over our inability to control time, therefore we value clocks as they seem to restore our power overtime. To acquire the esteem of others, one must put this power into evidence and is not surprising to find that the acquisition and display of clocks and watches has been a major field of collecting in the past as well as modern times.

Although their use persisted over a longer period, sundials, waterclocks and hourglasses technically belong to ancient civilizations. Truly new methods of time-keeping proliferated in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance - with all the sociological changes we now understand so thoroughly in a newly "computerized" world. The advent of an individual's ownership of a watch placed the responsibility for utilziing his time firmly at his doorstep. The invention of the minute hand (and later the second hand) linked time to one's "pattern of breath"... time could be actually perceive fleeting in a very physical way on the clock's face. The individual became accountable to the minute; eventually having to "clock on and off" in the workplace. Computerization of "civilized" society has in a sense rendered man a cypher, with all the dehumanization of spirit which that entails.

It is interesting to note that over a period of a few hundred years the invention and development of timepieces progressed at different rates in different parts of the civilized world, and so we are often faced with apparent disparities concerning the chronological evolution of clocks and watches.

The Church or Town Clock was the focus of control in the lives of the people during the Middle Ages, indeed the word "clock" originally meant bell; a homage to the striking of the bell to tell the hour of the day. The mechanism itself was known as an Horologe and early clocks were without dials... the hour was often signalled by automata emerging at intervals much in the manner of a cuckoo clock. Generally water powered, they were built as early as the ninth century. A.D., The Caliph of Baghdad presented one to the Emperor Charlemagne in A.D. 809. It struck the hours by means of falling ball bearings and reprimed its own mechanism, but it was not a mechanical clock. Clocks such as these existed in many towns in France and Germany. Their automatic figures, often in armour, sometimes on horseback and grotesquely made up, appeared at the correct moment and toned the hour by striking a bell.The clock tower in Venice, The Strasbourg Clock set up in 1352, and the Clock of Neves Rathaus in Munich are examples of this period.

By the fourteenth century, clocks with dials began to appear. Set up in towers and high places, these dials could easily be observed by the populace of the town. In England the oldest surviving clock is that of Salisbury Cathedral dating from 1382. However, it has been modernized at regular intervals over the centuries and little of its original components remain today. The clock of Wells Cathedral, made ten years later, is now in the Science Museum in London. These early clocks were handmade from wrought iron by blacksmiths or locksmiths. The Dondi clock was a notable exception of which the maker's detailed description survives. Dated 1364, it was made of brass, bronze and copper, with seven dials showing Lunar and Planetary Motions as well as Time on a 24 hour dial. The clock took its maker Dondi (an Italian) sixteen years to construct and seems to have been far "ahead of its time".

During a creative explosions of time measurement the table clock emerged. An immediate forerunner of the watch, it could not utilize hanging weights so a new power source was designed - the coiled spring. The "Nuremberg Eggs' of Peter Henlein were described in 1511 thus ..."Constructed out of a little iron, clocks with numerous wheels, which can be wound up at will, go 48 hours, strike and be carried in a purse as well as a pocket". They had only one hand, the hour, but they sufficed in a land where the Town Crier still called the "midnight hours".

By the eighteenth century a watch was yet another indication of a man's wealth or position. In 1748, in a burst of gentlemanly conduct, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield instructed his son to "wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one". To this day a watch, apart from its accuracy, will speak volumes about its owner's financial or social status, sense of style or self image. When one collects antique timekeepers one seems to acquire the sum total of the time passed: a life of "unforgiving minutes" made captive in some metaphysical aspect of duration.

There is often "virtue in necessity" and as ownership of watches increased, new and inexpensive alloys were found. Amongst them was Pinchbeck Gold, a new alloy of one part zinc to five parts copper which was discovered in 1721 by Christopher Pinchbeck who, throughout his entire lifetime jealously guarded its formula. It was also used extensively for clocks, buckles, sword hilts, cane heads, whip handles, spurs and snuff boxes. It was noted in a description from the period that "it cannot be distinguished by the nicest eye from real gold".

Also in this period of history the possession of a watch became a mark of distinction amongst the German middle class. Not long after, the Swiss and French took the lead producing beautiful and valuable timepieces carried exclusively in the pocket. Following the example of the French watchmaker, Lepin, watches became thinner, lighter and more simple in design. Gem encrustation all but disappeared, replaced by the utility of engraved surfaces. Under the patronage of successive Louis' - XIV, XV and XVI - French clockmakers prospered and became members of Royal Households commissioned to produce extravagant designs.

This resulted in a proliferation of ormolu work, the use of tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl and precious stone inlays. Dials were frequently enamelled and developed a symmetrical statuary.

As the waistcoat for gentleman grew shorter with the changing fashions, watches and fobs increased in popularity. It became the vogue for men to wear two watches with fobs, one in each pocket! The exquisite Comte d'Artois, later to become Charles X of France, wore buttons on his coat each set with a tiny watch.

Inevitably perhaps, the first machine-made watch was produced in America in 1838. It was known as the "Pitkin" and heralded the era of the "dollar watch" which could adorn every wrist. Overnight we became inveterate clock-watchers. Open-faced watches were the firmly established mode by 1890 and because of an exciting byproduct of the discovery of radium, phosphorus paint was used on the clock face -we could now tell the exact time in the dark.

In this century especially, there is a variety to the form of watches which defies description. Contemporary design now encapsulates all periods and all socio-economic groups. In the world of watch-making names such as Cartier, Patek, Philipe, Piaget, Audemars, Piquet, Vacheron, Constantine and Chopard hold dominion, offering a standard of design workmanship and materials which enable Piaget to, quite validly, make the statement that the watch "is a work of art which tells the time".

In a sense everyone today with a reasonable income has become a collector of watches including the revolutionary and inspirationally marked plastic Swatch and its imitators. The term "plastic" is derived from a Greek work which means formless and able to be moulded. It is this very quality which makes it just as suitable to "contain time" as are the "timeless" precious metals. We respond positively to these analogies between man-made and natural materials. Most of design has something of this thought process intrinsic to the creative surge. We are creatures who enjoy mythic dimensions even, or perhaps particularly, in relationship to our sophisticated toys. The "Digital Time" was somehow lacking in mystery; we wished to search the face of clocks for unseen answers to our allusory questions. Is there one of us who would not enjoy consulting the world's most expensive watch, the Phoebus by Piaget, appropriately named after the Greek Sun God and God of the Arts... the product of a thousand hours of craftsmanship in platinum, its diamond-paved dial shining forth with an almost celestial light... a perfect manifestation of Plato's concept that.