Watch (no. 4111)
circa 1827
What one must first know about this objet d’art is that it is an incredibly thin piece, a feature specially enabled by the fitted balance wheel within. Turned on its side exactly 90 degrees, the watch's wide elegant face (as seen on the left) becomes a mere sliver of gold - slim not only in perspective, but also in weight.
The precision of the watch - crafted and executed without a single computer or fancy digital design programme in sight - is one that seems to laugh at today’s contemporary ideals of ‘advanced technology’, and at the common misconception that ‘bigger’, more complicated methods always yield better-than-before results. With respect to the arts, this is rarely true, and this pocket watch proves it: a machine could not have made its metal surface any smoother or its shape more circular. It could not have rendered its numerals more accurate in size or in symmetry, and it certainly could not have made its hidden dials and rotary systems perform more seamlessly. In all of these qualities lies a talent found uniquely in the human eye and in its willingness, and innate capability, to then forge it into something tangible. The only effect a machine could have on an object as this would be that of stripping away the originality created from the watch’s bare hand-to-object contact. It would erase its characteristic ‘blemishes’ (minute though they may be) made throughout its formation, those which form the bread trail from its conception to final birth. The watch would become an empty entity; a mindless mechanical face with no personality imbued in its shiny skin. But fortunately, the era into which this Breguet watch was born was one where artisans strove off of what their raw talents, aided only by secondary tools and the like, could earn them. Depending on one’s understanding of the idea of evolution, it is questionable as to whether humankind is indeed progressing and maturing as much and as far as it could be, and whether it is only a matter of time before it realises that some of its innovations are but cheap, regurgitated copies of the past - redundant and sterile, unlike their ancestors.
