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To understand the History of the Swiss Watch you need to grasp the History of the Swiss Watch INDUSTRY
By Fortunat Mueller-maerki
Bookreview
To perceive the History of the Swiss Watch you need to grasp the History of the Swiss Watch INDUSTRY
History of the Swiss Watch Industry, From Jacques David to Nicholas Hayek, by Pierre-Yves Donzé. Translated from the French firstborn by the author and Richard Watkins. Published 2011 by Paul Lang, Bern (Switzerland) 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-1021-5. Paperback; 23 cm x 16cm, vii & 161 pages; a good deal of tables and graphs; 301 foot-notes, indepth bibliography. Available from the publisher at [...]
Most broadly mesmerized students of horological history have -in the course of the years- read a significant number of books on the history of the Swiss watch. Most of these books fall in one of two categories. Either they are histories of the engineering science and innovation , or they are historical descriptive narrations when it comes to an person or a brand. The book beneath review follows neither path, and thereby covers much ground hardly covered in any other publication.
The author is a young Swiss academic who received his PhD in history at the University of Neuchâtel in 2005, and presently teaches at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. His book is proof that in order to genuinely grasp the history of any trade or industry it does not suffice to recognise the history of it is technology, and the history of the key players (both persons and corporations). Unless one studies the structure of an industry and how the dissimilar actors relate to each other, and how these relationships and structures change over time, it is out of the question to comprehend an industry.
Donzé structures his history into four distinct periods: The primary (covered on pages 5 - 26) is the pre-industrial era (1800-1870), before there were watch factories in Switzerland, which was characterized by the "établissage" system where the "etablisseur" ordered elements from innumerable independent workshops, and had them accumulated by other subcontractors into watches. The result was an extreme fragmentation. In the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds alone there were in the year 1870 over 1300 independent endeavors (mostly family workshops), disseminate over 67 distinct specialities, but on intermediate employing beneath 10 humans each. Separate endeavors each made one component: remainder spring makers, escapement makers, hand makers, gilders, case hinge makers, case polishers, enamel dial fitters, etc, to name just a few. The contrast to the USA, where Waltham had started mass formulating machine made watches in the 1850s was dramatic. Rather than in a `factory', Swiss watches were made in what Donzé calls a local "industrial district" .
The second amount of time (1870-1918, pages 27-74) is characterized by the gradual industrialization of the watch industry. The Swiss horological industry reacted to the `American challenge' by shifting production from mainly manual workshops, to mechanized factories. Just as crucial was the change from habit fitting each part to fit the others to part-making to specified dimensions and tolerances, a alter initiated by Jacques David, the young Technical Director of Longines, who - after experiencing the power of mass production at the Waltham booth at the 1876 Philadelphia exhibition -initiated and led a technology revolution allround the industry. But there still was very little vertical integration. Separate endeavors continued to make cases, escapements, dials, wheels. Even if they were growingly machine, driven they remained comparatively little endeavors (the intermediate factory in the horological industry in 1901 employed 37 people).
The third amount of time (1920- 1960, pages 75-114) covers the era of the Swiss watchmaking `cartel', for the duration of which a government mandated and enforced set of rules prevented most forms of contest within the Swiss watch industry. Fixed minimum prices helped the survival of most elements of the industry. Labor unions accorded to never go on strike, factories accorded to never lock out labor. Increasing the capacity of a facility was contingent on government approval. This setup succeeded to a big extent in preventing Swiss elements being exported for assemblage abroad. A key step was the creation of ASUAG, a kind of super-holding company that legally was the owner of most factories making ebauches, hairsprings and escapements, even if in exercise the former owners still ran most of those factories.
That snug arrangement came to an end around 1960 as new watchmaking nations started to engage in the global market. Japanese manufacturers pushed basi into Asia, later into the rest of the world. USA firms like Bulova and Timex became global brands (and Russia - principally with second hand American machinery purchased from bankrupt US makers -dominated in the communist part of the world). The fourth period, liberalization and globalization (1960-2010, pages 115-152), was likewise caused by a technical revolution: the rapid rise of the quartz timekeeper. A wave of mergers in the late 1960s led to the formation of various multibrand groups, of which SSIH (Omega, Tissot and others) was by far the largest, and ASUAG eclipsed the ebauches field. In the 1970s both SSIH and ASUAG found their conventional world markets collapsing underneath global competition, and a consortium of banks rescued them temporarily. The key player of the next stage was Nicolas Hayek, a former management consultant, hired by the banks to restructure their holdings. Hayek in 1983 proposed merging SSIH and ASUAG and by 1985 he had become the controlling share holder and CEO of the new entity, which became the Swatch group. Hayek transformed this grouping of watch factories into a merged watch developing giant, but one where the real power and the primary conclusions were made by the brand units and the marketing people, rather than being overshadowed by production and technology.
In addition to Swatch, two other, newly formed groupings emerged (LVMH and Richemont) that chose a likewise marketing focused, multi-brand strategy, based on a united supply chain. Both had origins outside of Switzerland and outside the watch industry, and both purchased existent and founded new watch brands.
The book also briefly covers the recent history of the niche segments of Swiss watchmaking, the distinguishable and fiercely independent Rolex enterprise, and the comparatively little volume Geneva lavishness brands, including Patek Philippe.
The book is easy to read, and the English translation is very well done. The writers decision to entrust the translation to a native English speaker who is primarily a watch historian rather than a professional translator was a wise one, and this reviewer principally appreciates the all to rare exercise of oftentimes adding the introductory French terminology in parentheses whenever highly industry specific specialized vocabulary is used.
Many students of the history of watchmaking seem to have unconsciously chosen an arbitrary point in time when they assume "history" ends and "the present era" starts, which in some manner is less deserving of scholarly inquiry. Such thinking is of course a fallacy because the present all to soon will be history. Donzé's book deserves praise and attention for systematically documenting and analyzing a rather recent part of our horological heritage.
When reading his book this reviewer was struck with how arousing and attention holding even the most recent events are if analyzed with clear or deep perception and intellectual rigor.
To genuinely comprehend the history of horology it is necessary to not only study the horological artifacts of the past and the horologists of the past, but to also study the horological `sociatal' distinct elements of the past, such as political, economic and industrial structure, systems and practice. Let us hope that more writers will follow Donzé's path, and instruct us horological history beyond just the history of objects, or the history of endeavors and individuals.
Fortunat Mueller-Maerki, Sussex New Jersey - November 2011
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