Images courtesy RGM Watch Co.
Fashion research centers are dictating that the time of the watch is now. Experts disagree about what’s driving the trend, but it’s clear that the functional object on your wrist is back in style. And the features available on today’s watches, along with the price ranges, are pretty impressive.
Check out the faces of the retro-masterpieces being handmade today, right under our noses, in Mount Joy. As different from an inexpensive quartz battery watch as they could be, these fashionable accessories crafted by RGM Watch Co. (www.rgmwatches.com) are things of beauty.
Take the Caliber 801, for example, or the Pennsylvania Tourbillon. Painstakingly built around the only watch movement still made in the U.S., as opposed to being built around a Swiss movement, RGM’s timepieces incorporate hand-crafted details you didn’t even know you loved until you saw them.
For Roland G. Murphy, who owns RGM Watch Co., it’s been a long-time fascination, beginning with the Wiley Coyote watch he got when he was 8 (on display in his vault) and moving up to the more intricate, spring-powered watches that have been popular for more than a century. “I think the cool thing is having these little mechanical machines you wear on your arm,” says Murphy, as he holds up the new 801 model on his wrist, as yet unnamed and scheduled to be released in 2014.
You can catch the fever just by looking at several RGM models whose clear sapphire crystal backs let you see the inner workings. “People are fascinated with mechanical watches,” observes Murphy, “so being able to see some of the parts functioning means you’re seeing the beauty of the movement itself.” Once you see this, it’s hard to go back to that inexpensive model.
After all, there’s a lot more to look at. It turns out that there are about 200 tiny parts in a watch like the 801. For RGM’s Benoit Barbe, it is this very aspect that hooked him.
“It’s the complexity, the delicacy,” Barbe says. “You have to be very careful.” His patience is evident as he scrutinizes a custom watch they’ve been building. Using a jeweler’s loupe, they have been hand-finishing each part, spending hours brushing the top and the sides. This careful attention to detail is why RGM makes fewer than 300 watches per year, some taking almost the entire year to be completed, while they work to repair and restore other fine watches.
Finding a company like this in Pennsylvania is no accident. Watchmaking is, apparently, in our blood. In Lancaster County, historic clockmakers thrived, and Lebanon County was once home to 14 clockmakers. John Esterlie’s grandfather clocks from New Holland are famous, and Kauffman’s Handcrafted Clocks in Ronks is still making timepieces. North a few miles is the Lititz Watch Technicum school, where soon-to-be watchmakers learn the trade.
According to Dan Nied of the York Time Institute (www.yorktimeinstitute.com), the Susquehanna Valley has been home to clock and watchmakers for centuries. “You had huge numbers of them around here, and their work was very prized,” he says. Around the corner from the Institute in York, which teaches the art of clock- and watchmaking and repair to a whole new generation, lived Phineas Davis, who got his start as a watchmaker. Half a block down Johnathan Jessup made grandfather clocks, now collector’s items, and John Fisher and Elisha Kirk were also well-known clockmakers. In Lancaster there was the Hamilton Watch Co. Specializing in pocket watches, their motto was “Hamilton– The Railroad Timekeeper of America.”
But before the railroad, and for most of history, time was subjective. Neil Poirier of the National Watch and Clock Museum (www.nawcc.org) in Columbia explains, “When railroads made it possible for people to travel from one place to another quickly, around the 1870s and 1880s, we had to set up time zones, and we still all go by the same timetable and zones.”
You can see the progression of timekeeping at the museum, which is much more interesting than you might think. Walk in and become mesmerized by the ticking and grinding and chiming and cuckoo-ing of a multitude of clocks.
Far from a dry history of timepieces, the museum is alive with working models, from mantel clocks to Scottie eyeroll novelty clocks, which indicate the time by rolling their eyes. It’s like walking through time, literally, as you pass sun dials, atomic chronometers, fretwork showcase models, incense timekeepers, water clocks, statuary pieces and musical, animated monumental clocks. According to Poirier, there’s a lot of history involved. “Time is a universal story,” he says, explaining that “everyone can relate, a goat herder or someone on Wall Street.”
Surprisingly, it is today’s youth who have perhaps the strongest relationship with timepieces. Fueled in part by the steam punk movement and, as Nied puts it, “a huge resurgence in what came before,” the younger generation is snatching up vintage-style timepieces. “The mechanical watch is more popular today than ever,” notes Nied, “and it’s become a big collectible with young people today. The difference is they want something as big as possible, so some of these watches are the size of pocket watches on the wrist.”
These throwback masterworks are sought by watch collectors and the fashion-conscious. They don’t multi-task. They simply tell time. They tell it accurately, and beautifully, and that’s enough.
