HSNY Awards Record $150K in Financial Aid at Gala (Pics)

Lifetime Membership Card Crafted by Voutilainen SA

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) held its 158th anniversary Gala & Awards Ceremony on Saturday, April 6, 2024, where it awarded a record-breaking $150,000 in financial aid to 25 watchmaking students and four U.S. watchmaking schools, and raised an additional $113,000 toward its mission to advance the art and science of horology.

HSNY celebrated a night of philanthropy, glamour, and horology at its annual gala held once again at the historic Harvard Club of New York City across the street from the Society’s headquarters. The black-tie affair brought together 280 esteemed VIP attendees, community leaders, and passionate supporters, all uniting under one roof to champion horological initiatives.

Richard and Carol Heppner, Gala 2024

Highlights of the evening included guests of honor Carol Heppner, the great-granddaughter of HSNY’s founding president George Schmid, and actors Ben Ahlers and Simon Jones from HBO’s The Gilded Age, which has a storyline featuring HSNY.

Actors Ben Ahlers and Simon Jones from HBO’s The Gilded Age, Gala 2024.

Attendees also took part in a lively auction, where they had the chance to bid on items and experiences generously donated by HSNY sponsors and supporters. Lots included one-of-a-kind experiences and coveted watches, and of course, HSNY’s 2024 Lifetime Membership Card, which was auctioned by Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo and sold for a hammer price of $18,000. The one-of-a-kind card, which grants lifetime membership privileges at HSNY, is an 18-karat gold hand-engraved card by Voutilainen SA and features a stunning design and brilliant guilloché pattern. 

Philanthropic activities continued throughout the evening, with famed horologist and HSNY Trustee Roger Smith OBE who presented this year’s ceremonial giant check to watchmaking student Justin Baxter of the Lititz Watch Technicum. HSNY awarded a record $150,000 in scholarships and awards in 2024. (Please see below a full list of financial aid recipients.)

Roger Smith OBE presents a ceremonial giant check to watchmaking student Justin Baxter of the Lititz Watch Technicum, Gala 2024.

HSNY thanks all participating brands, sponsors, members and guests for their support! A save-the-date for HSNY’s 2025 Gala & Awards Ceremony is coming soon!

For more information about HSNY and how to get involved, please visit www.hs-ny.org. 

Participating Brands

  • A. Lange & Söhne

  • Audemars Piguet

  • The Armoury

  • Blancpain

  • Breguet

  • Bulgari

  • Cierto Tequila

  • Collectability

  • Grand Seiko

  • H. Moser & Cie

  • HODINKEE

  • Jaeger-LeCoultre

  • Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo

  • Roger W. Smith

  • Romain Gauthier

  • Ulysse Nardin

  • Vacheron Constantin

  • VomBoden - Importer of Fine Wines

  • Wempe

  • Watches of Switzerland

HSNY 2024 Financial Aid

  • The Henry B. Fried Scholarship for Watchmaking Students

    • Paolo Gonzales (Nicolas G. Hayek Watchmaking School)

    • Brandon McAnally (Paris Junior College Watchmaking Program)

    • Max Conser (North Seattle College Watch Technology Institute)

    • William Ready (North American Institute of Swiss Watchmaking)

    • Nicholas Amelung (Lititz Watch Technicum)

    • Gideon Bodley (Lititz Watch Technicum)

    • Itay Edry (Lititz Watch Technicum)

  • The Charles London Scholarship for Watchmaking Students

    • Brandon Hoorfard (Nicolas G. Hayek Watchmaking School)

    • Bryan Borquez (North American Institute of Swiss Watchmaking)

    • Michael Davanzo (North Seattle College Watch Technology Institute)

    • Youri Boggio-Pola (Lititz Watch Technicum)

    • Samuel Mallow (North Seattle College Watch Technology Institute)

    • Hudson Mickey (Lititz Watch Technicum)

  • The Grace Fryer Scholarship for Female Watchmaking Students 

    • Greta Berckmueller (Lititz Watch Technicum)

    • C Luise Pitcairn (Lititz Watch Technicum)

    • Isabella Sosa (Paris Junior College Watchmaking Program)

    • Khalisah Tanner (North American Institute of Swiss Watchmaking)

    • Lezlie Soule (North Seattle College Watch Technology Institute)

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

Reading Time at HSNY: See You in the Chat Room

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY. Today’s article is guest-written by our intern, St John Karp, a graduate student in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute.

Image 1: Swatch Skin “Silverize” (2000) displaying the time as @922 beats.

Alternative Ways of Telling the Time

In 1999 Swatch launched a satellite into orbit around the planet Earth. Sputnik 99 (or “Beatnik”) carried a radio transmitter designed to synchronize the time for Swatch’s “.beat” line of watches. These watches could tell the time using conventional hours, minutes, and seconds, but their selling point was that they could also display the time using Internet Time, a Swatch initiative backed by MIT that divided the day into 1,000 beats. The director of MIT’s Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte, channeling the argot of the dot-com era, said, “Cyberspace has no seasons and no night and day. Internet Time is absolute time for everybody. Internet Time is not geopolitical. It is global. In the future, for many people, real time will be Internet Time.”

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) has an extensive collection of ephemera in its library, and during my internship, I was able to dig up a number of Swatch catalogs from the late 1990s and early 2000s that showcase Swatch’s attempt to reinvent time (see image 1).

Decimal time and alternative time-keeping systems have a history as long and checkered as my pajama pants. The French revolutionaries in the 1790s proposed decimal units of time as part of the Republican calendar, which reinvented the calendar with new months and seasons and set the year One as the first year of the French Republic. Horologists such as Louis Berthoud made clocks and watches that displayed this metric time, and several of HSNY’s books detail the history of these gorgeous pieces (image 2). Sadly the Republican calendar did not outlast the revolution, though I’ve calculated that my birthday would have fallen on the first day of Thermidor — the month when people tended to get assassinated.

Image 2: A French Revolution-era clock with a ten-hour dial, from “La Révolution dans la Mesure du Temps,” a book in HSNY’s library.

In a similar vein, Fritz Lang depicted a 10-hour clock in his film Metropolis, both as an aspect of the film’s futurism but also as a symbol of the mechanization of humanity. In the same film, a man is made to function as a machine part by physically moving the hands on a large dial to match a sequence of light bulbs (image 3). Traditional Chinese timekeeping uses the shí, a unit of measure that divides the day into 12 hours (an interesting parallel to Western timekeeping). However, it also employs the kè, which represents one-hundredth of a day and places it squarely in the category of decimal time.

Image 3: A man clings to the hand of a ten-hour clock in “Metropolis” (1927).

The main reason a decimal clock failed to take off in Western timekeeping might be mathematical. When an hour has sixty minutes, a third of an hour is a round number that lines up with the twenty-minute mark. A decimal clock, on the other hand, with one hundred “minutes” in an hour, would mean that a third of an hour would be 33 ⅓ minutes and would not align with any indicators on the clock face. The twenty-four-hour day and sixty-minute hour are in fact so convenient that, in training simulations for the planet Mars, NASA employs a time system that simply stretches Earth hours and seconds to last slightly longer and sync up with the Martian day.

Perhaps another reason decimal time never caught the popular imagination is because it carries an element of the uncanny. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four famously opens with, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The thought of a clock striking thirteen is so unnatural that it can presage the horrors of living under a totalitarian state. In Eugène Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano the clock strikes as many as 29 times while two couples engage in alienating and unsettling dialog (see image 4). Like the distorted sense of space in Gothic literature, a clock that strikes the wrong number disorients us and fills us with a sense of dread.

Image 4: From “The Bald Soprano”: “[The clock] is contradictory and always indicates the opposite of what the hour really is.”

Don’t be fooled by the wreckage of the past, though. Decimal time is alive and well. Every Unix computer since the 1970s, which includes your MacBook and your Android phone, keeps track of the time in seconds elapsed since the beginning of the “epoch” (January 1, 1970). This number, currently somewhere in the one billion seven-hundred millions, is due for a reckoning in the year 2038 when it will grow so large it will overflow the computer’s ability to store it, similar to the crisis that happened in the late 1990s with the Y2K bug.

Of course if computer programmers are the only ones using alternative time systems today, they’re also the only ones joking about them. The furlong-firkin-fortnight (FFF) system of units uses the fortnight as the basis of its timekeeping. Paired with SI units this makes the microfortnight equal to approximately 1.2 seconds. The same sense of humor is probably responsible for the fact that Linux computers can still tell the date using the calendar of the Discordian religion (a stoner-inspired parody in a similar vein to the Flying Spaghetti Monster). My computer informs me that today is Sweetmorn, the thirteenth day of Discord in the Year of Our Lady Discordia 3190.

Image 5: Swatch Signs “Net” (1996)

Talk of computers brings me back to the dot-com era when the Internet was still shiny and new. Swatch had toyed with engaging in internet culture as early as 1996 when they released a watch that made prominent use of the @ sign (see image 5). Swatch, holding fast to the @ as an indicator of internet cred, repurposed it in 1998 as the beat symbol for their Internet Time. The premise of this timekeeping system was that it would be the same number of beats in any location around the world, neatly defenestrating the entire concept of time zones but failing to replace them with anything else. You could say to your friend in Norway or Australia, “Meet me in the chat room at @722 beats,” but you would have no idea whether 722 beats would be early in the morning or late at night. Swatch, perhaps guiltily aware of the flaw in their system, appeared to draw attention to it in a promotional video in which a man is woken up by a friend calling from a different country because the friend is using Internet time and doesn’t understand how early he’s calling. The two go back and forth about what time it really is, but the friend doesn’t get the concept of time zones now that he’s discovered Internet time.

Image 6: Swatch Skin “Shadiness” (2000) displaying the time as @431 beats.

The Planck time is the shortest unit of time possible given the laws of physics, but that is still longer than Swatch’s ill-starred satellite was operational. It ran afoul of commercial broadcasting regulations and had its batteries removed shortly before it was released into orbit from the Mir space station. It was decommissioned before they even pushed it through the airlock, and became garbage floating in space. Internet Time persisted as a key part of Swatch’s digital offerings for the next few years but the catalogs in HSNY’s library show that Internet Time had largely dropped off the radar by about 2003. The official Internet Time website, however, is still online and loyally informing me that it’s @583 beats right now. See you in the chat room!

HSNY Establishes a Partnership With the Antiquarian Horological Society

Championing Horology Across the Pond

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) announces today that it has established a partnership with the Antiquarian Horological Society (AHS) based in London, England.

Since 2021, HSNY has been partnering with like-minded nonprofit organizations to further their mutual interests in continuing to promote the art and science of horology.

Issues of AHS’s Antiquarian Horology, available to browse at HSNY’s Jost Bürgi Research Library.

Established in 1953, the AHS is a friendly and inclusive membership organization for those fascinated by the Story of Time. With a large array of digitally searchable assets, they aim to be ‘Ancestry’ for the world of timekeeping and run a diverse program of talks, meetings, and visits around the UK and overseas, including annual international study tours. The AHS publishes a quarterly learned journal, as well as a wide range of books, and supports education, conservation, and research through bursaries, prizes, and awards. AHS members span thirty countries and joining only takes a few seconds.

“As we embark on this journey together, we are inspired by the possibilities that lie ahead,” said Dr. James Nye, AHS Chair. “Our partnership represents a shared commitment to collaboration, integrity, and excellence in all that we do for the field of horology.”

Learn more about the Horological Society of New York here.
Learn more about the Antiquarian Horological Society here.

Welcoming New HSNY Members, March 2024

HSNY would like to welcome the following new members. It is only with our members' support that we are able to continue flourishing as America's oldest watchmaking guild and advancing the art and science of horology every day. 

GOLD

  • Alexandre Tilly, NY

  • Charles Gross, NY

  • Clark Barwick, IN

  • John Hoffman, FL

  • Michael Williams, Washington, D.C.

SILVER

  • Bassem Shaaban, NY

  • Colm J. Lannigan, NJ

  • Jimmy Gardner, Washington, D.C.

  • Joshua Rosen, NY

BRONZE

  • Alexander R. Harbin, NY

  • Baturay Turkmen, NY

  • Beau Coleman, NV

  • Ben Liang, MD

  • Benjamin Buker, VA

  • Benjamin Duckless, NH

  • Carmelo Pascucci, Italy

  • Cyril Reol, Switzerland

  • Douglas D. Coughran, AZ

  • Erik Dryburgh, CA

  • Evan S. Woschnik, NY

  • Gideon Bodley, PA

  • Greta Berckmueller, PA

  • Ivan Gonzalez, FL

  • John Hullah, England

  • Jon Vaughan, GA

  • Joseph Zimmerman, NY

  • Leo Suarez, PA

  • Marjan Pjetrushi, PA

  • Martin Cukier, NY

  • Maxwell Munafo, PA

  • Michael DeProspo, NY

  • Parks Morgan, FL

  • Richard Dos Santos, NY

  • Robert L. Chacona, NY

  • Rodrigo Artavia, NJ

  • Ryan Grant, GA

  • Scott Anchin, VA

  • Shane Krumeich, CT

  • Shannon Donohue, PA

  • Tom Alessi, CT

Reading Time at HSNY: Diamonds Are a Watch’s Best Friend

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

For much of the past few centuries, watchmaking comfortably occupied a position as part of the jewelry trade. It’s one reason why journals in our library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) often contain references to both, as is the case with the German title “Schmuck und Uhren.” Uhren means watches, and if you’re familiar with Yiddish, don’t worry, it’s okay to say schmuck in German–it just means jewelry.

Image 1

An issue from the first year of publication of “Jeweler’s Weekly,” dated March 3, 1886, demonstrates the connections between the trades. In New York, jewelers had already established a thriving business district on Maiden Lane. This area near the southern tip of Manhattan was the center of the jewelry trade, including watchmaking, from around 1800 through the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, one of HSNY’s founders, George Schmid, had a watch repair shop just off Maiden Lane in the 1880s. 

The “Jeweler’s Weekly” office address is printed on the front cover of the magazine: 41-43 Maiden Lane, a few doors down from what would be the Diamond Exchange, an early skyscraper reinforced to support the weight of jewelers’ heavy safes. The cover (image 1) shows a clock in the lower left corner, and is subtitled “A journal for the jewelry diamond watch silver ware & kindred trades.” (Unrelated, a couple of cupids in the sky above send a message of love by telegraph.)

A two-page spread inside the magazine (image 2) shows an inventory of some of the most well-known watch manufacturers at the time. On the American side: Waltham, Elgin, and Illinois. On the Swiss: James Nardin (cousin of Ulysse), and Vacheron & Constantin. There are also some less familiar names including the “Lady Racine” watch pictured, as well as Bryant & Bentley, seller of “fancy stone rings.” Much like today, there’s a healthy market for imitation gems, including one brand of imitation diamonds called “solar brilliants.”

Image 2

On another page, the Illinois watch company advertises “the smallest American watch made” with an engraving showing the movement, presumably at actual size, about 33 mm (image 3). An advertisement I particularly enjoy, for Abbott’s patent stem-winding attachment, shows a caricature before and after: a grumpy-looking man with mutton chops is upset because “his watch has run down and his key is in the pocket of his other pantaloons” (image 4). On the right, his face is alight–Abbott’s stem-winding attachment has ensured that he is never again in this sad position! 

Abbott’s invention essentially transforms a key-wound watch into a stem-wound watch, that you could wind with just your fingers. This advertisement came out around the time when watches transitioned from key-winding to crown winding (hence the “great reduction” in the price of key-winding movements above). So the problem Abbott’s attachment solves would not be a common one for much longer.

I include this curiosity not to mock our glum, keyless friend, but rather to undercut the impression many of us have of people from this period, mainly from posed photographs, as serious, somber, and humorless. They knew how to have fun in 1886, as anyone who’s watched The Gilded Age this season will know! The watch and jewelry trade was no exception.

Image 3

Image 4

Ads also show how peripheral trades served the same clientele and marketed themselves toward jewelers: makers of “fine cut glass,” china, silverware, spectacles, thimbles, buttons, pens, display cases, music boxes, and something called an “automatic eye-glass holder.” People working in these trades often made use of the same materials and techniques as watchmakers, and sometimes occupied the same workshops. If you could engrave a spoon handle, you could probably engrave a watch case, and people in New York in the late 19th century were doing both.

As far as non-advertising content, there isn’t much in the magazine, but there are updates on new technology, job postings, and industry surveys in various countries. Columns tell jewelers the industry news of the week, including information about robberies (“A paper of diamonds was seized…under peculiar circumstances”) and about people in the profession (“John [Redacted], an old Cleveland, Ohio, jeweler, is insane.”) 

For New York jewelers, there are more detailed updates about members of the community, even covering minutiae like one Mr. Bliss’s troublesome knee inflammation! Again, far be it from me to mock Mr. Bliss, who was just getting ready to go out West on a selling trip before his knee acted up. Rather, the level of concern and care among the community is touching. It reminds me of the early members of HSNY, who founded the organization to support each other and their loved ones, providing a stipend when members were unable to work. In 2020, HSNY revived this spirit to support working watchmakers through the pandemic.

In addition to the “Jewelers Weekly,” our library features a number of volumes of the “Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone,” a merger of several related magazines which is still published today as JCK. I know that this publication was an early part of our collection because one of the volumes is stamped in gold “property of the Horological Society of New York.”

I can’t capture everything that goes on in the many pages of this magazine, but its earlier issues are full of stunning Art Nouveau-style illustrations, as shown in images 5 and 6—covers from 1903 and 1911, respectively. Advertisements of the early 20th century feature trendy items of the time such as railroad watches, auto clocks, leak-proof fountain pens, and electric lighted signs for businesses. Although some of the content focuses on the business part of the jewelry trade, a “Technical Department” feature in the magazine includes “lessons” by noted horologists on topics like “The Influence of the Escapement on the Isochronal Vibrations of the Balance.”

Image 5

Image 6

Image 7

Later issues start to use eye-catching photography and color on the cover to lure readers (see image 7). A read-through of the 1950 volume of “Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone” shows how jewelry provided women an entry point into the horological trade, and not just as models or muses. In the January issue, a story with photographs features Edwina Duvall, a high school senior in Pasadena who decides to enter the profession (image 8). She gets a job with a jewelry shop owner who is at first skeptical that it might be a young girl’s “romantic” idea to work there, just a “passing whim.” After only a week, however, the shop owner is convinced of her aptitude, and upon her graduation, he offers her a full-time job, saying she knows as much about the business as those who’ve been in it for years. For her part, Edwina is thrilled that she’s already made several sales over $300, including watches selling for around $150 (about $1,900 today.)

Image 8

JCK had a national audience, but for those interested in New York history, the ads in this 1950 edition of the magazine, which list the addresses of businesses, clearly show that the center of gravity for the trade had shifted. Jewelers no longer call Maiden Lane home and have moved to the Diamond District on West 47th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues–where the jewelry industry still thrives today, just three short blocks from HSNY headquarters. A recent ABC News piece filmed in our library and classroom, below, features interviews with female entrepreneurs of the Diamond District, who would have made Edwina in Pasadena proud.

In a “High Snobiety” article that quotes HSNY Deputy Director Carolina Navarro, Scarlett Baker writes that watches have more recently become dominant in store windows in the district due to demand: “47th Street has etched itself on the horological map as the place to go in the US for rare Rolexes, niche Patek Philippes, and Audemars Piguets. And the street’s promise of hard-to-come-by haute horology is second only to the knowledgeable merchants that occupy it.” Image 9 shows a tableau of the Diamond District during the evening rush hour, with its iconic diamond-shaped street lights visible above the swirl of pedestrians and flashing neon.

Image 9

Although we still subscribe to jewelry-related journals at HSNY and they’re always available for perusal at our library, I wanted to include a mention of a few non-periodical books. One is the recent Bulgari: Beyond Time, a very beautiful and hefty coffee table volume that you might be able to spot in one of the pictures in my article about big and small books. Other items in our collection focus on watchmakers who are also known for their jewelry, like Cartier, or on techniques that apply to jewelry, like engraving on precious metal. We even have two new books about the Diamond District written by authors with personal connections to 47th Street, “Diamond Stories” by Renée Rose Shield and “Precious Objects” by Alicia Oltuski.

Looking at these books and magazines reminds us that watches are and have always been jewelry. They’re not only jewelry–they also occupy a position of some practicality that other pieces of jewelry might not–but they proudly belong to the trade. If you walk down 47th Street today, you’ll see that the heritage of horological jewelry is alive and ticking, glittering at you from behind thick glass, shining out into the loud, bright city night.

HSNY Unveils 2024 Charity Auction Lots

2024 Lifetime Membership Card Created By Voutilainen SA

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY), America’s oldest watchmaking guild, founded in 1866, unveils today an extraordinary lineup of auction items in support of its ongoing mission. As part of HSNY’s commitment to advancing the art and science of horology, the Society is hosting a live auction in collaboration with Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo.

Scheduled to take place at HSNY’s sold-out Gala & Awards Ceremony on Saturday, April 6, 2024, the auction promises an array of one-of-a-kind experiences and coveted watches generously donated by sponsors and supporters of HSNY. Highlights include unique New York experiences and HSNY’s exclusive Lifetime Membership Card, a solid 18K yellow gold card hand-engraved and guillochéd by Voutilainen SA which grants the owner lifetime membership privileges at HSNY.

This year’s auction items are:

LOT 1 | Endeavour Wall Clock and Dinner Experience with Edouard and Bertrand Meylan, Donated by H. Moser & Cie. (Estimate: $2,500 to $5,000)

LOT 2 | An Oris X Bracenet Aquis Watch with Unique Engraving and Four Premium New York Yankees Tickets, Donated by Oris (Estimate: $4,000 to $8,000)

LOT 3 | Omakase Experience with Chef Daisuke Nakazawa, Donated by Grand Seiko (Estimate $5,000 to $10,000)

LOT 4 | Custom Safari Jacket, Donated by The Armoury (Estimate: $800 to $1,600)

LOT 5 | Reverso Discovery Workshop, Donated by Jaeger-LeCoultre (Estimate: $700 to $1,400)

LOT 6 | Watchmaking Experience, Donated by Ulysse Nardin & Wempe (Estimate: $1,500 to $3,000)

LOT 7 | Étude N°2 Guilloché Number 00 Watch with Light Rose Dial, Donated by The Lyrique Group (Estimate $20,000 to $40,000)

LOT 8 | 18 Karat Gold, Hand-Engraved, HSNY 2024 Lifetime Membership Card, Donated by Voutilainen SA (Estimate: $15,000 to $30,000)

All lots are offered with no reserve and no buyer’s premium, and 100% of proceeds from the sale of the items will go towards HSNY’s ongoing educational initiatives, including providing watchmaking students and schools with financial aid. 

Absentee bids may be submitted in advance of the auction via email to info@hs-ny.org, and will be accepted until 5PM EDT, Friday April 5, 2024. Please note that all absentee bids submitted are final and may not be canceled once confirmed. By submitting a bid, you accept personal liability to pay the total purchase price including all applicable charges and taxes.

Visit the 2024 Charity Auction page for full lot details and images. Happy bidding!

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

ABOUT PHILLIPS IN ASSOCIATION WITH BACS & RUSSO

Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo is the watch department at Phillips auction house, dedicated exclusively to the world's finest collectors' watches. Launched in November 2014 by Aurel Bacs and his partner, Livia Russo, the department was established in response to the ever-increasing need for today's collectors to easily access scholarship, guidance and quality across the board. Based in New York, Geneva, London, Hong Kong and Japan, the team of specialists at Phillips Watches is dedicated to an uncompromised approach to quality, transparency, and client service. Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo holds the world record for the most successful watch auction, with its Geneva Watch Auction: XIV having realized $74.5 million in 2021. 2023 marked the second most successful year for Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo with an annual total of $215.8 million. www.phillips.com/watches

HSNY Celebrates 158 Years of Horological Tradition

Dear Friends,

This year marks a significant milestone for the Horological Society of New York as we celebrate 158 years of serving our horological community. Since our founding on March 26, 1866, we have remained committed to our mission of advancing the art and science of horology through education, thanks to unwavering support from donors like you.

Over the past 158 years, we have achieved many milestones, including awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial aid to watchmaking students and schools across the United States, hosting industry experts at monthly lectures, teaching horology classes in New York City and abroad, and assembling one of the largest horological libraries in the world right here in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. None of this would have been possible without the generosity and trust of supporters like you who believe in HSNY's mission and help us make a real impact on the lives of others.

As we reflect on our journey so far, we are filled with gratitude for all that we have accomplished together, and your continued support is crucial as we strive to usher in the next 158 years.

To celebrate our anniversary, we invite you to join us in making a special donation. Your contribution will help us offer more scholarships to students, expand our educational programs and library, and allow us to advance future projects. 

Together, we can continue to make a difference and create a brighter future for our community. Thank you for being a part of our journey and for your continued support.

With gratitude,
Horological Society of New York

All donations are tax-deductible as HSNY is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, federal tax identification number 13-6139887.

Revolutionizing Craftsmanship: HSNY Introduces Engine Turning (Guilloché) Classes

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) has been offering classes to the public since the 1950s. The award-winning classes are taught by professional watchmakers weekly in New York City and further the Society’s mission by making horological education accessible and enjoyable for the public. Today, HSNY launches its latest educational endeavor: Engine Turning (Guilloché) Classes. The first installment of this limited-series curriculum will be taught by a well-known expert of the art, Brittany Nicole Cox.

Brittany Nicole Cox

Engine turning, also known as guilloché, is an intricate art form that has adorned fine timepieces, jewelry, and decorative items for centuries. With a rich history dating back to the 1500s, engine turning is a craft practice that spans many cultures, disciplines, and design philosophies.

"Our Engine Turning Classes represent a fusion of tradition and innovation," said Carolina Navarro, Deputy Director at the Horological Society of New York. "In an age dominated by digital technologies, there's a growing appreciation for the meticulous craftsmanship and tactile experiences that engine turning offers. We aim to preserve this cherished art form through these classes while inspiring a new generation of artisans."

HSNY’s specialized classes are intended to introduce participants to the mesmerizing world of engine turning, while opening the door for a more in-depth curriculum to develop in the future. Led by Brittany Nicole Cox, students will have the opportunity to engage in two levels of introductory engine turning.

Participants will have the opportunity to delve into a variety of topics, including:

  • History and evolution of engine turning

  • Fundamental principles of guilloché patterns

  • Hands-on experience with engine turning machines

HSNY’s Engine Turning Classes with Brittany Nicole Cox are scheduled for:

  • Wednesday, April 24, 2024 (2-hour course)

  • Friday, April 26, 2024 (2-hour course)

  • Saturday, April 27, 2024 (5-hour course)

Design examples produced by engine turning!

Small class sizes (6 students max) ensure personalized instruction and ample opportunity for practical learning. HSNY’s classroom is equipped with two engine turning machines — a Uhrlinger rose engine from the 1860s and a straight-line mill machine from the 1920s. Both are on long-term loan from HSNY Trustee and horologist Aldis Hodge. For weekday classes, students will decorate a pendant or spinning top that they can take home with them. For the weekend course, students will decorate two double-sided medallions with unique patterns and take a deep dive into the history and application of engine turning. Enroll today at http://hs-ny.eventbrite.com/.

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About Brittany Nicole Cox

Brittany Nicole Cox is an artist, antiquarian horologist, guillocheuse, and scholar based in Seattle. Her lifelong passion for horology has seen her through nine years in higher education where she earned her WOSTEP, CW21, and SAWTA watchmaking certifications, two clockmaking certifications, and a Masters in the Conservation of Clocks and Related Dynamic Objects from West Dean College, UK. She founded Memoria Technica in 2015 where she teaches, makes original work, and operates her conservation studio. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and was featured in National Geographic and two feature-length documentaries. She has written for Vanity Fair and is working on a manuscript to be published by Penguin Press.

About the Horological Society of New York

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

Welcoming New HSNY Members, February 2024

HSNY would like to welcome the following new members. It is only with our members' support that we are able to continue flourishing as America's oldest watchmaking guild and advancing the art and science of horology every day. 

GOLD

  • Antoine Salles, Hong Kong

  • Robert May, CA

  • William H. Julien, FL

BRONZE

  • Agustin J. Edwards, FL

  • Ailer Thomas, NY

  • Alex Chiu, NY

  • Andrew Saidel, MD

  • Arnold Schraa, CT

  • Brandon Wong, CA

  • Chio Hong Fai, Macau

  • Dana Klimp, MN

  • Derrick Carman, NJ

  • Edward Hillenbrand, NY

  • Felicity Ng, Hong Kong

  • Gabriel Cruz-Mattei, NJ

  • Jeffrey Mortimer, MA

  • Mark Thorley, APO AE

  • Nathan Desloover, NY

  • Nathan Kiatkulpiboone, Thailand

  • Niall Smyth, England

  • Noel Velez, NY

  • Paul Liao, VA

  • Richard Zinman, NY

  • Robert Kelley, GA

  • Shawn Wallerstein, FL

  • Vedant Sharma, NY

Welcoming New HSNY Members, January 2024

HSNY would like to welcome the following new members. It is only with our members' support that we are able to continue flourishing as America's oldest watchmaking guild and advancing the art and science of horology every day. 

GOLD

  • Gregory R. Michael, MD

  • Justin Werner, NY

SILVER

  • Anthony Missud, NY

  • Chris Senio, NY

BRONZE

  • Avis Bullard, MD

  • Benjamin David Mayer, NY

  • Chris Kim, IL

  • Christian Bond, NY

  • Christopher Salih, NY

  • Dan Lundquist, NY

  • Dan Royter, NY

  • Elmo Lovano, CA

  • Federico Callizo Pecci, FL

  • Greyson Korhonen, NY

  • Harlan Matusow, NY

  • John Penney, CA

  • Johnathan Nice, FL

  • Luis Cordon, FL

  • Marc Thorpe, NY

  • Mark Gardner, NY

  • Matthew Jaquith, VA

  • Matthias Schmid, Switzerland

  • Michael Lindsey, NY

  • Rafael Campo, PA

  • Robyn Steimer, NY

  • Taimur Ahmed, NY

  • William Zachary Ready, TX

Reading Time at HSNY: All Books Great and Small

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini. 

When it comes to watches, they come in all sizes. Bigger is not necessarily better. There are dainty dials, shining with miniature detail above equally minute movements, marvels of micromechanics. There are huge slabs that look like they need their own checked luggage tags. And there are medium-sized watches that try to be all things to all people–as ubiquitous as a Toyota Camry. 

The same goes for books. Today I’ll share with you some of the biggest and smallest specimens in the HSNY library. Some are so large they could be used as solar shades (if we weren’t concerned about UV damage to the books) while others could be smuggled in your cheek.

The big books in the library were easy for me to find because, well, they announce their presence. They’re the Panerais in the room, beefy, all-around chonks. If you’re a librarian who works with them, you can go ahead and skip arm day. In image 1, you can see a selection of our biggest books, with two 750 mL bottles for scale. Their publication dates range from 1765 to 2023.

One prominent, incredibly unwieldy book in our collection is J. P. Morgan’s catalog of watches (the red book in image 1). This might sound familiar, because the name J. P. Morgan is even more omnipresent in American life than a Toyota Camry. Morgan, a financier, was a collector of many things, not just clocks and watches–a visit to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City will give you a sense of the scale of his collection of rare books, fine art, gems, and other objects. Morgan donated his watches to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1913, where they remain to this day. We have a copy of Morgan’s illustrated collection catalog. 

Morgan produced a very limited number of hand-colored editions of this catalog printed on vellum and finished with bits of real gold. One of these copies sold in 2012 for $26,000, and you can see a few pictures of the sumptuous illustrations here. In our library, we have a more modest facsimile in black and white, but even the facsimile is quite a rare book. Pound for pound, it’s also one of the heaviest in our collection at 13 pounds, 12 ounces, roughly the weight of a plump cat. It measures 15 inches tall by 12 inches wide and is over four inches thick (in image 2, a can of sparkling water for scale.)

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Image 3, a plate from Morgan’s collection catalog, shows a silver watch in the shape of a skull, a popular motif when this watch was produced, around 1600. Watches of this type are intended as a kind of memento mori, meaning that every time you look at this watch, you should think about how you’re one second closer to your inevitable death. Its jaw unhinges to reveal the movement in its mouth. Snap, your time’s up!

In image 4, a relatively tamer watch from 1660, made by Henry Grendon, displaying an intricate engraved dial covered by an octagonal-cut rock crystal. The outer case, shown below the watch, is made of shagreen, which is processed shark or rayfish skin. Even though the color isn’t visible in this version, you can see the pebbly, bubbly texture of the shagreen, further ornamented by silver stars. The catalog’s enormous plates, replicating the details of a watch in real size, are what make the book so desirable and expensive, then as now.

One of the oldest big books in our library is Diderot’s “Encyclopédie,” coming in at 16 inches tall by 10 ½ inches wide (image 5, no trick photography used).  Denis Diderot edited this famous work in the second half of the 18th century, during the Age of Enlightenment, when a group of authors hoped to present a secular, all-encompassing version of scientific and cultural knowledge. The encyclopedia consisted of 28 volumes, with a full 11 of them made up of plates (engraved, printed illustrations). We have only one part of one volume, which includes the plates from the section on Horlogerie. Because that’s the only one we care about, n’est-ce pas?

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Our volume, published in 1765, contains 64 plates, alongside an editorial text that is 25 pages long, most of it a detailed description of each of the images. (The encyclopedia entry for “horology,” attributed to renowned horologist Ferdinand Berthoud, was published separately from these plates.) 

I won’t be able to include many of these incredible images, but you can see high-resolution scans of all of them on this academic website: the first section contains 51 images while the second section contains 13 additional images. 

Some plates illustrate movements by particular watchmakers, like the equation clock by Berthoud pictured in image 6. Some focus on horological tools, from those still familiar to a modern watchmaker (image 7) to those that may now appear less familiar (a machine for experiments on the friction of pivots in image 8). Other exploded schematics show all the parts of a watch or clock (image 9) or specific features like a repeater (image 10).

Our smallest books were harder for me to find in the library than the big ones, but once found, they excel in usefulness. Imagine, someone challenges your escapement knowledge in a social situation. But then…you pull out your four-by-six travel-sized copy of “An Analysis of the Lever Escapement” and confidently prove that it was in fact Thomas Mudge who first applied the detached lever escapement to watches around 1754. Your friends applaud wildly. You’re suddenly invited to the best parties. Your life changes forever.

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One such practical pocket-book is another Berthoud classic originally published in 1759, “L’Art de conduire et de régles les pendules et les montres” (or “How to manage and regulate clocks and watches.") Our copy is a fourth edition that was printed in Paris in 1811 and measures about 6 ½ inches tall by 4 inches wide. 

Berthoud greatly expanded on his earlier written work in “Essai sur L'horlogerie,” the first edition of which appeared in 1763. Here at HSNY, we have first and second editions in our rare books case. They’re gorgeous, but they’re a solid medium size, so I’m not going to write about them in detail here. You can come and see them in our library in person, or look at one of several high-quality scans of other copies on Google Books.

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Lest you think we have only a big Berthoud (“Encyclopédie”), a medium Berthoud (“Essai”), and a small Berthoud (“L’Art de Conduire”), we actually have an EVEN TINIER Berthoud, this time in German. This book, originally published in 1828, is in fact a translation of “L’Art de conduire et de régles les pendules et les montres,” rendered in German as “Die Kunst mit Pendel- und Taschenuhren umzugehen und sie zu reguliren” (see both mini Berthoud and micro Bethoud in image 11, with a loupe for scale). Our copy is a little speck of an edition printed in Berlin in 1989, and it measures just three inches by four inches. A glance at image 12 (with a hand for scale) shows this book reproduces in facsimile the original fraktur typeface, which many German publishers used well into the 20th century. If you’re not used to it, it can be difficult to read even in a larger size. 

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Image 13 shows three books together: a tiny reproduction image from “Die Kunst mit Pendel- und Taschenuhren…”; the original fold-out plate from the small “L’Art de conduire…les montres”; and, on the bottom layer, a similar illustration from Diderot’s giant “Encyclopédie.” What is amazing is that the artist of the small engraving was able to convey nearly as much detail as the artist of the larger work, albeit with slightly less image clarity. Both images manage to show multiple aspects of movement construction, including a fusée.

You could imagine the tiny book being useful to a working watchmaker or clockmaker two hundred years ago. If you needed a quick consultation at the bench, you could keep this book within arm’s reach. 

Similarly, in the 20th century, watchmakers used planners or diaries to organize their lives and to have convenient access to useful information; we have a collection of over 50 of these agendas in our library dating from 1878 through 1971. Image 14 shows them above a shelf of very large books including Morgan’s catalog and two copies of Diderot’s encyclopedia.

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Image 15 shows a selection of colorful agendas in chronological order: 1906, 1924, 1939, and 1953. Two are in German and two in French. The 1924 and 1939 volumes show advertisements on the covers, but almost all of these agendas contain ads inside. In image 16, the same books are arranged in clockwise order from top left, and you can see the advertisements that grace the inside covers. 

In 1906, for instance, the inside front cover shows an American-style factory in Schramberg, Germany called the Hamburg American Clock Factory, which later merged with Junghans. Two smokestacks rise high over the long brick buildings, where the ad says they are producing fantasy clocks, tall case clocks, hanging clocks and the “cheapest, most beautiful house clocks.”

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I was surprised to find that the tabs inside the planners, indicating different sections, also highlight the ad pages, so that the 1924 agenda contains, for example, one tab leading directly to a table showing the price of postage, and one tab advertising Ulysse Nardin chronometers and watches. Then as now, brands no doubt paid for prime placement that would get them noticed by the largest number of working watchmakers.

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These planners include other useful features like a loop for storing a pen or pencil, tables of common measurements, horological dictionaries, brand indices, a section for recording receipts, and a ruler. The ruler on the spine of the 1924 volume shows it’s a petite 15 centimeters long, just under 6 inches and shorter than an iPhone (image 17). Despite their useful nature, most of our copies don’t seem to have been written in, though there are exceptions where some watchmaker has scribbled a calculation or an appointment time. 

A question this article raises is, why are some books so big and some are so small? This is not a stupid question. In fact, it’s so smart that I don’t have one answer for you. The answer is a combination of factors like cost of production, regularity of use, and the intended audience for the books when they were published. Was this book going to live in a library and serve as a reference for researchers? Or was it going to get carried around in a pocket and whipped out in the workshop? Did someone want to wow their visitors in a grand home, or impress their boss with their ability to fix something without assistance? Just like watches, books exist at an intersection of function, style, and artisanship, and some lean more heavily into one of these three priorities. A book isn’t just a bodiless container for information–it has its own corporeal presence, and it’s telling you more than just what’s in the text.

HSNY Welcomes Six New Sponsors in 2024

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY), America’s oldest watchmaking guild founded in 1866, welcomes six new sponsors in 2024.

Their commitment to supporting HSNY’s mission of advancing the art and science of horology exemplifies a shared dedication to making a positive impact on our industry.

HSNY wishes to thank Glashütte Original, Bulgari, J.N. Shapiro Watches, WatchTime, ZENITH, and MB&F for their incredible support!

About Glashütte Original

Glashütte Original upholds the values of authentic manufactory production and can look back on an uninterrupted history that began in 1845. Located in the Saxon town of Glashütte, the manufactory brings traditional craftsmanship and innovative technologies together under one roof. The tradition-rich brand produces up to 95% of all movement components as well as the filigree dials in-house and represents the art of German watchmaking at its best.

Official website: https://www.glashuette-original.com

About Bulgari

Part of the LVMH Group, Bulgari was founded in the heart of Rome in 1884.

Over the decades, the Brand has established a worldwide reputation as magnificent Roman High Jeweler and icon of Italian art of living thanks to its exquisite craftsmanship, visionary design and audacious color combinations.

Through a pioneering vision intrinsic in the brand’s DNA since its founding, the company’s international success has evolved into a global and diversified luxury purveyor of products and services, ranging from fine jewels and high-end watches to accessories and perfumes, and featuring an extended network of boutiques and hotels in the world’s most exclusive shopping areas.

Demonstrated through its numerous philanthropic partnerships, Bulgari deeply believes in innovating the present for a sustainable future through its commitment to Social & Environmental Responsibility and giving back – to nature and to the community.

Official website: https://www.bulgari.com

About J.N. Shapiro Watches

Joshua Shapiro, an educator by trade and training, founded the J. N. Shapiro watch company in 2018. He had begun by making engine-turned dials for other brands, and in 2018 he launched his first watch under his own name – the Infinity series. These watches featured highly complex, engine-turned dials with traditional and exotic materials. Soon after, in December of 2021, JN Shapiro Watches produced the first tantalum wrist watch cases made outside of Switzerland for the Infinity Series.

Since the launch in 2018, the company has expanded and relocated to a workshop and office space in Torrance, California. Here, the team of 3 watchmakers, 2 CNC machinists, and a master engraver continues to push the envelope of American watchmaking.

The Resurgence is the company's latest line of watches, a fully U.S. made watch in development for over four years. It is a culmination of a dream that began from the humblest of starts. These watches are meant to inspire individuals to pursue perfection, to enjoy both the journey and the destination.

Official website: https://www.jnshapirowatches.com

About WatchTime

Now celebrating its 25th year of publication, WatchTime magazine is the best-selling watch magazine in North America and one of the leading watch publications in the world. The magazine’s dedicated readers consume watch related content on a bi-monthly basis with the print magazine and 24/7 on WatchTime’s digital platform, www.watchtime.com. In addition, WatchTime has a robust Instagram and Facebook social media channels as well. The magazine is also a celebrated producer of watch-related events in the United States with the highly successful WatchTime New York event taking place each Fall in New York City and other multi and mono-branded watch events around the United States.

Official website: https://www.watchtime.com

About ZENITH

ZENITH exists to inspire individuals to pursue their dreams and make them come true – against all odds. Since its establishment in 1865, ZENITH became the first vertically integrated Swiss watch manufacture, and its watches have accompanied extraordinary figures that dreamt big and strived to achieve the impossible – from Louis Blériot’s history-making flight across the English Channel to Felix Baumgartner’s record-setting stratospheric free-fall jump. Zenith is also highlighting visionary and trailblazing women by celebrating their accomplishments and creating the DREAMHERS platform where women share their experiences and inspire others to fulfil their dreams.

With innovation as its guiding star, ZENITH exclusively features in-house developed and manufactured movements in all its watches. Since the creation of the El Primero in 1969, the world’s first automatic chronograph calibre, ZENITH has gone on to master high-frequency precision and offers time measurements in fractions of a second, including 1/10th of a second in the Chronomaster collection and 1/100th of a second in the DEFY collection. Because innovation is synonymous with responsibility, the ZENITH HORIZ-ON initiative affirms the brand's commitments to inclusion & diversity, sustainability and employee wellbeing. ZENITH has been shaping the future of Swiss watchmaking since 1865, accompanying those who dare to challenge themselves and reach new heights. The time to reach your star is now.

Official website: https://www.zenith-watches.com

About MB&F

After a 15-year career in management at prestigious brands, Maximilian Büsser left his role as CEO of Harry Winston in 2005 to create MB&F – Maximilian Büsser & Friends. MB&F is a laboratory dedicated to art and micromechanical engineering, set up to design and create small editions of radical watches, the fruit of collaboration with exceptional professional watchmakers, chosen by Maximilian Büsser for their talent and working methods. With over 20 remarkable calibres forming the base of the critically acclaimed Horological and Legacy Machines, MB&F continues to follow Büsser’s vision of creating 3-D kinetic art by deconstructing traditional watchmaking.

In 2007, MB&F unveiled the HM1, its first Horological Machine. With its sculptural three-dimensional case and finely decorated movement, the HM1 set the tone for the Horological Machines that were to follow – Machines which symbolize time rather than merely Machines used to read it. In 2011, MB&F released the Legacy Machines collection. These round pieces are more classic than MB&F's other creations, and pay tribute to the watchmaking excellence of the 19th century, reinterpreting the complications from innovative key watchmaking figures as objects of contemporary art.

There have been distinguished accolades reminding us of the innovative nature of MB&F’s journey so far. To name a few, there have been no less than 9 awards from the famous Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, including the ultimate prize: the “Aiguille d’Or”, which rewards the best watch of the year – in 2022, for the LM Sequential EVO.

Official website: https://www.mbandf.com

HSNY Sponsors, 2024

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Reading Time at HSNY: Sex and Its Complications

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini. 

Many watch collectors will tell you that watches can be sexy. Usually the adjective is interpretive, not literal–watches make us feel something, give us a flutter or a wink, increase our sense of confidence or attraction. But what about watches that are literally sexy? What about watches that reproduce sex acts on the small scale of micromechanics?

I was quoted in an article about erotic watches that was published in The New York Times on Valentine’s Day in 2023, and in honor of the return of that romantic period I thought I would share some more details from my research. My main sources are two books from the Horological Society of New York library, “Hours of Love” by Roland Carrera (1993), and “Erotische Uhren” by Christoph Prignitz (2004). Although these books are richly illustrated, I won’t be able to include many of the images in this article because they’re too explicit–all the more reason to visit our library in person and do your own research!

Erotic watches feature miniature images of sexual scenes on the dial or caseback of the watch, often hidden behind a decorative metal cover that springs open to reveal a secret painting. On some of these watches, tiny human automata (sometimes called jaquemarts) move when the watch runs, simulating sex acts. That type of moving erotica wouldn’t have been easily available elsewhere in the age before film.

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You can see a couple of tamer examples in images 1 and 2, from the book “Erotische Uhren.” On the watch in image 1, a repeater from about 1820, a soldier stands next to a young lady in a flowing yellow dress with an elaborate hairdo, who is holding her hand to her mouth as if laughing. On the back of the case, the source of the lady’s mischievous expression is revealed: her dress is hiked up and the soldier’s hand is on her bottom. The two lovers on the watch in image 2, a French example from around 1800, are similarly discreet. She touches his face tenderly as they gaze into each other’s eyes. When the metal frame is opened, they’re having sex under their clothes.

In the 18th century, erotic watches were a status symbol. They were expensive and not designed for practicality. Their heyday in the late 18th century was a period in France where mistresses and courtesans were a part of the aristocratic, libertine lifestyle, and middle-class people might try to emulate that perceived sexual freedom through acquiring erotica.

During the same period in the 18th century, there was also a flourishing of erotic literature in Europe, including novels like “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill),” by John Cleland and “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, as well as the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Erotic watches reflected the broader literary and artistic taste of the time. In “Erotische Uhren,” Prignitz talks about how these watches combined the idea of rationality and discipline (measuring time precisely, being on time) with uncontrolled sensuality and passion. They’re something hidden in plain sight, breaking a taboo in a place you wouldn’t expect.

In 18th-century Europe, since aristocratic men were the main audience for these watches, the erotic images were tailored to their tastes. They often feature “classical” or even biblical themes that would have been familiar to those with access to private education, including Leda and the Swan, nymphs and satyrs, and Venus and Adonis. Other common scenes are bawdy stories from Boccaccio's “Decameron,” the sins of priests or clergymen, lusty nuns, cheating wives being caught by their husbands, and the seduction of female servants and shepherdesses. 

For those unfamiliar with the sexual mores of past centuries, the subjects of these watches can be surprisingly diverse. There are watches with homosexual scenes, as well as people from different races and social classes. They sometimes include three or more participants enthusiastically enjoying each others’ bodies. During this period, colonization encouraged an idealized concept of freer, more natural sensuality among the people of colonized nations than among white Europeans. So a subset of erotic watches depicted sex scenes involving African and Asian characters. 

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Later on, there was a period when watchmakers adorned erotic watches with photographs instead of enamel paintings. In Image 3, an early 20th-century watch shows a series of photographs of naked women, printed on a rotating wheel underneath the dial. With a few exceptions, though, the subjects of erotic watches haven’t changed much since the 18th century; some of the more recent pieces are reproductions of earlier designs. 

Who was making these expensive and highly specialized pieces? In the 18th century, most of these watches were created anonymously or with false signatures, mainly by French and Swiss manufacturers. Watchmakers didn’t want to damage the reputation of Swiss manufacturing by signing erotic watches for export. Also, there were repeated efforts to suppress erotic watch production, most notably in Geneva in the early 19th century. 

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Some of the watches pictured in this article, however, are signed, like the one in image 4, produced by Breguet & Fils in about 1850 and pictured in the book “Hours of Love.” It shows a relatively modest scene of two women and one man in Roman-style dress, their intimacies strategically obscured by the dial. Similarly, we know that these watches were sometimes commissioned for a specific owner, but owners tended to keep their identities private, so the historical record is slim.

Although their popularity declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, erotic watches were certainly made into the 1990s with some regularity, including by Blancpain, Svend Andersen, and Jacquet Droz. Today, manufacturers of erotic watches no longer hide their identities. The Richard Mille 69 Tourbillon Erotic was manufactured in 2015 and worn by the rapper Drake in 2019. Inventively, it uses words, rather than images, to convey a sexy statement: three rollers engraved with interchangeable phrases function kind of like an erotic slot machine. 

The Jacob & Co. Caligula with “concealed erotic scene” is another recent addition, as is the Ulysse Nardin “Classico Manara” series featuring a woman/mermaid romance told over the course of ten watches. People are still innovating in the service of erotic art, as evidenced by a sketch I found folded in our copy of “Erotische Uhren.” The anonymous reader was attempting to figure out the mechanics behind some erotic automata, perhaps hoping to create a watch of their own (image 5).

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Looking at these watches in a social context, they served as a way for rich men to connect over private sexual jokes. However, even though these watches mostly portrayed women according to men’s fantasies, they could also show women with sexual agency, seeking out and enjoying sex. In an introduction to a 1997 Antiquorum auction catalog in our library that features erotic watches, Dr. Ruth Westheimer (yes, the Dr. Ruth!) puts forward a sex-positive view of them, writing “a couple can both share in the joys of beholding the incredible precision of the tiny movements, which will not only amaze in their intricacy, but most certainly trigger the sparks that later can ignite more fevered passions.”

In “Hours of Love,” Carrera has a similar take. He coyly calls erotic watches “conversation pieces.” The conversation part comes in because, according to Carrera, “their purpose was to allow a man to entertain a lady in conversation which might then lead to a meeting of the minds or possibly bodies.” From my view, I think calling these watches “conversation pieces” illustrates something about how watches can have complicated, multilayered meanings. Watches participate in a broader cultural conversation, speaking about what their owners find valuable, interesting, or romantic. Again, erotic watches have never been openly accepted or publicly embraced; yet they persist, signifying a part of our culture that never gives up the impulse to shock and arouse.

Important HSNY Artifact Comes Home

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Recently, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) received an important artifact from our early history. We were contacted out of the blue by Carol Heppner, who had found a mysterious plaque. The wood and metal decorated plaque reads, in German: “to the founder, the honorary president George Schmid, on the occasion of the 50 year jubilee of the New York Watchmakers Society” (see image 1).

Heppner contacted us, unaware that her great-grandfather George Schmid (sometimes spelled Schmidt) was none other than one of HSNY’s founders in 1866! According to our historical documents, a group of 16 German immigrants founded HSNY on March 26, 1866 as the Deutscher Uhrmacher Verein (German Watchmakers Society). At the time, dues were 25 cents a month, and members built a fund that would pay a weekly wage if one of them were to become sick and unable to work. Even in its first decades, the organization collected a technical library of books for watchmakers to consult.

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George Schmid was elected as the organization’s first president. In image 2, a gala program from 1916 shows that Schmid (left) was one of two original founders who lived to see the organization celebrate 50 years (the other is trustee Frederick Ruoff). In 1916 the Society held its 50th anniversary “jubilee,” which is where grateful members presented Schmid with this honorary plaque. Image 3 shows the original photograph of Schmid used in the 1916 gala program, which now lives in our archives.

In the late 19th century, HSNY went through different variations of German and English names, until 1930 when we adopted our current moniker. (We have a collection of HSNY gala programs and other historical documents at the Jost Bürgi Research Library.)

After speaking with us, Heppner graciously donated her great-grandfather’s plaque to HSNY, where it is now displayed alongside other artifacts of our early days, including photographs, membership cards, and newsletters. In December 2023, she was able to travel to HSNY in person to give us this important gift. Image 4 shows Heppner presenting HSNY Executive Director Nicholas Manousos with the plaque. 

Image 5: Heppner also brought in several pieces from a family collection of pocket watches in order to research their history. Here, Heppner and her husband Richard Heppner show the watches to Manousos. Although we can’t offer appraisals, we encourage visitors to bring items to the library if they’re interested in researching their own pieces using our books.

We’re very grateful to Heppner for bringing the plaque home to our collection. Her contribution honors not only her great-grandfather, but also the generations of watchmakers who have relied on their membership in our organization for community and support. We hope visitors to the library will enjoy seeing the plaque up close as part of HSNY’s storied legacy. 


If you think you might have HSNY memorabilia, or you spot something online, please let us know at info@hs-ny.org!

HSNY Announces The Andre Bibeau Scholarship for Veteran Watchmaking Students

Honoring & Empowering Those Who Have Served

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) announces today the establishment of the Andre Bibeau Scholarship for Veteran Watchmaking Students. The newly formed financial aid opportunity, whose creation supports HSNY’s mission of advancing the art and science of horology, aims to assist veterans pursuing a career in watchmaking, honoring and empowering those who have served.

About the Andre Bibeau Scholarship for Veteran Watchmaking Students

The history of veterans-turned-watchmakers is interwoven with both war and innovation. Returning soldiers often face challenges reintegrating into civilian life. Recognizing their technical skills and need for purpose, visionary programs like the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking emerged. These initiatives provided veterans, particularly those with disabilities, with the meticulous training and tools needed to master the art of watchmaking. Organizations like the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative carry on this legacy. Today, HSNY joins in the commitment to ensuring the success of veteran watchmaking students.

Andre Bibeau (Photo: Anne-Marie Sholtes)

Pvt. Andre L. Bibeau (1925 - 2016) was a World War II veteran who served in the Army Infantry and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. In 1943 he was assigned to the 141st Infantry Regiment out of Fort Meade, MD and was deployed to the Italian front as a private. He was wounded twice in Italy and subsequently awarded the Purple Heart.

Upon leaving the Army, Andre Bibeau attended the Bulova School of Watchmaking in New York. After graduating from the Bulova School, Bibeau opened his own successful watch repair business until he retired at age 75. The Andre Bibeau Scholarship is made possible by a generous donation from Maj. Michelle A. Cunningham and Aaron M. Cunningham.

“As a military family we have seen firsthand the fundamental importance of veterans having meaningful careers,” said Aaron M. Cunningham. “We are thankful that the Horological Society of New York shares our goal of helping veterans pursue their passion after their service has finished.”

Any student who has been accepted or is currently studying at a full-time watchmaking school in the United States and is a veteran is eligible for the Andre Bibeau Scholarship. Prospective students may also apply, with the understanding that the scholarship is contingent on their enrollment at a full-time watchmaking school. The scholarship will be awarded every April with awards up to $5,000 available. Veterans interested in applying can find detailed information on HSNY’s website.

2024 Financial Aid Opportunities

In addition to the new Andre Bibeau Scholarship for Veteran Watchmaking Students, HSNY is offering eight scholarships and awards to ensure the success of watchmaking students and institutions across the United States. All application periods are January 1 to March 1 and financial aid is awarded in April.

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ABOUT THE HOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

Founded in 1866, the Horological Society of New York (HSNY) is one of the oldest continuously operating horological associations in the world. Today, HSNY is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art and science of horology through education. Members are a diverse mix of watchmakers, clockmakers, executives, journalists, auctioneers, historians, salespeople and collectors, reflecting the rich nature of horology in New York City and around the world. http://hs-ny.org

Upcoming Lecture: Mastering the Art of Precision: A Journey Into Hand Engraving Techniques

Artur Akmaev, Founder of Artur Akmaev Watches (Santa Monica, CA)
January 8, 2024

Embarking on the journey of mastering the art of hand engraving is a rewarding and intricate process that requires dedication, patience, and a keen eye for detail. But how can one start practicing hand engraving and what is the process?

At the January lecture of the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), Artur Akmaev, founder of his eponymous watch brand, will share his experience working with different hand-engraving styles and techniques that he has learned and applied to his watches, culminating in his recent collection complete with fully engraved dials showcasing craftsmanship at its finest.

*Doors open at 6PM ET, lecture to begin at 7PM ET. RSVP is required.

** The lecture video will be available to members immediately, and to the general public following a two-month delay.

Reading Time at HSNY: Women in Horology

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini. 

If you’ve been paying attention to my articles, you’ll know they often note the ways that women show up peripherally in our library collection at HSNY: as loving inscribers and anonymous students; underage or endangered workers in watch factories; and horological tourists marveling at public clocks.

The women I’m writing about today, however, are not on the margins. They’re main characters of horology, people with enduring influence as authors, collectors, and makers. Many had an impact beyond their lifetimes, and all overcame gendered barriers to their participation in horology.

The early writers: Mary Booth, Mary Howitt

From the 19th century comes the tale of two Marys, both female pioneers in horological writing. Mary Booth, a polymathic American author, was the first editor-in-chief of “Harper’s Bazaar,”one of the first fashion magazines in the country. She wrote or translated at least 47 books in seven languages, including several that were influential in gathering support for anti-slavery causes during the Civil War.

She published “The Clock and Watchmakers’ Manual” in 1860, a selection of technical and historical writings by different authors originally written in French. We have a copy in our library at HSNY. She’s listed as the author, but the use of the initials “M. L. Booth” on the title page suggests the publisher was aware that a woman’s name on a horological textbook might not be a selling point. (The publisher, John Wiley, still exists, and focuses on technical and scientific publications.)

Though she calls herself a “compiler” in the preface, Booth has done much more. Her preface relates a succinct history of timekeeping from the first water clocks to the most precise marine chronometers, demonstrating her own knowledge of the topic. 

Six detailed fold-out plates show how to assemble watches. Multiple plates picture the inside of an 18th-century watch from different viewpoints (see image 1). The work is deeply historical, and highlights technical features of different watches from well-known watchmakers of previous centuries.

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On the other side of the Atlantic, prolific Victorian author Mary Howitt published “My Uncle the Clockmaker” in 1845. Our copy is signed in pencil, in a delicate hand, “Miss Elizabeth Nichols from her sister Eunice,” showing that women actually read this book, and found it interesting enough to give as a gift. It’s part of a series called “Tales for the People and their Children.”

Howitt’s “tales” are a loosely connected set of stories about British country life. In the story, Nicholas, the young son of a gentleman, apprentices himself to a clockmaker, much to the chagrin of his father who sees it as a “degradation.” His mother, however, recognizes the worth of his new profession: “The first gold watch which he could put together to his own satisfaction, was presented by him to her on her birth-day [sic], and was worn by her with delight.” A shrewd customer, she appreciates the value of independent watchmaking. Nicholas soon sets up a successful trade, amazing “the country people, who were willing to carry watches as large as turnips” with his “lovely little gold and silver watches.”

Nicholas singlehandedly starts a rage for watches in his small community: “...what wonders had Nicholas to exhibit and explain to the customers. The consequence was, that scarcely a person within twenty miles round was now satisfied with his watch. He or she must have one of the new construction…There was no talk but about levers, escape movements, chronometers and engine-turning, and ornamental engraving of cases.” Most of the rest of the book takes place without Nicholas: at the height of his trade, he mysteriously disappears, only to reappear in disguise decades later to rescue his family estate with his entrepreneurial fortune. It’s a Victorian tale of triumph for anyone who has felt undervalued as a watchmaker, or indeed anyone whose parents disapprove of their chosen career!

The Correspondent: Emily Faithfull 

Unlike the authors above, the 19th-century writer and activist Emily Faithfull addresses the topic of female watchmakers–in her case, women and girls working at the Elgin factory in Illinois. Faithfull, who was British, visited America for the first time in 1872 and included an account of the Elgin factory in her book, “Three Visits to America” (1884). 

Faithfull was a women’s rights pioneer who advocated for the employment of women in many different trades including printing and watchmaking. On her first visit to America, she recounts receiving an engraved watch with a letter that reads: “The hands of the many working-women who have been busy in its fashioning are thus extended to you in sincerest appreciation of the work you are doing ‘in helping others to help themselves.’”

Intrigued, she visits the factory years later, where she sees women working with lathes, making hairsprings, and cutting jewels. She writes approvingly: “In London it takes an apprentice seven years to learn what a girl machinist becomes a proficient in after the first twelve months' work.” Women are “earning good wages” at Elgin, but they still are paid less than men. The combination of the factory system and female workers means that “while it takes about seventy hours of skilled hand labor to manufacture a watch [in England], it can be produced [in America] in thirty hours by girl operatives.”

An unsigned 1869 article from “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine” contains a similar account of women and young girls working in the Elgin factory (then known as the National Watch Company), work which could sometimes be dangerous (I covered this in my article about children’s books at HSNY).* According to the article, employees “are equally divided between the sexes” and women are earning six to twelve dollars a week, while men are earning three dollars a day. The Harper’s article, unlike Faithfull’s book, is illustrated. Image 2 shows rows of women at work in the “train room,” some operating lathes in front of tall windows at the right.

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As I have discussed in some of my other articles, women were a ubiquitous presence in watch manufacturing from the 18th century onward. In 20th-century America, women suffered ghastly illnesses as a result of radium exposure while painting luminescent dials. Female students studied alongside men at watchmaking schools, as evidenced by the signed notebooks we have at our library.

Although women signed their names on dials as early as the 18th century, few women have achieved recognition as individual watchmakers; Rebecca Struthers, discussed below, is one modern example, as is Danièla Dufour, though they are by no means the only ones.

The Collector: Laura Hearn

Among the many catalogs of watch collections we hold in our library, one stood out to me because of the name on the spine: “Mrs. George A. Hearn’s Collection of Watches.” Although today there is a thriving community of female watch collectors, this is the only catalog I’ve found in our collection with a woman’s name on it (well, nearly, because it’s still under her husband’s name).

Like many female collectors, Laura Frances Hoppock Hearn collected alongside her husband, George A. Hearn. An article about her probate in the New York Times in May 1917 mentioned her bequest of a collection of laces to the Metropolitan Museum, as well as the collection of “many ancient and quaintly-wrought timepieces.”

According to an obituary from the “Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” Hearn, who was “characteristically a New Yorker,” was “deeply interested in the city and its progressive life and development.”

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Hearn loaned her watches to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907, and had a catalog of the watches privately printed in the same year. A look at the frontispiece of the book (image 3) shows that Hearn collected big names in horology like Berthoud, but also stunningly decorative enameled watches in different shapes, like the butterfly in the center of the image. Our copy of the catalog contains the Hearns’ joint calling card (image 5), including their address on East 69th Street, then, as now, an expensive old-money address in New York City (something you’ll recognize if you watch “The Gilded Age”!). 

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Another female collector of the same era, Jeannette Atwater Dwight Bliss, lived a block away from Hearn on East 68th Street. Alongside her banker husband, George T. Bliss, she bought thousands of fine art objects, including clocks, and examples of European architecture, which were later donated to the Newark Museum. Other famous female collectors include royals like Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette, Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Fabergé collector Marjorie Merriweather Post, and French decorative arts collector Jayne Wrightsman.**

Modern Authors

In the 21st century, more women have entered into the world of published horological scholarship. One book that I often recommend to researchers in our library is Genevieve Cummins’ “How the Watch was Worn: A Fashion for 500 Years.” According to a review by our library’s patron, Fortunat Mueller-Maerki: “It has been about 500 years since people started carrying timekeeping devices around with them on their bodies, so it is a bit surprising that until now there has never been a publication dedicated to the question of ‘How to wear a watch?’” 

Cummins’ real achievement in this book is sourcing more than a thousand historical images of people of all genders wearing watches in all manner of surprising styles: on the wrist or on a chain, yes, but also on a chatelaine, as a ring, embedded in a handbag or lighter or snuffbox, as a pin, or as a hair accessory. 

Image 6 shows a spread from the book focused on nurses, all wearing watches that helped them care for their patients. Image 7 features ring watches, buttonhole and cufflink watches from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, as well as advertising materials.

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A recent internet analogue to this book would be Malaika Crawford’s “How To Wear It” articles for Hodinkee, in which she pairs a particular watch (say, the Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight) with couture, vintage, and sometimes avant-garde clothes and accessories.

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For other horological books by women with a broad historical sweep, I recommend Francesca Cartier Brickell’s “The Cartiers”(image 8) or the 1990s bestseller “Longitude”, by Dava Sobel. Both, of course, are available for perusal at the HSNY library.

Rebecca Struthers is the rare female author in our collection who is also a recognized watchmaker, having founded a workshop near Birmingham in 2012. According to her official biography, Struthers is the first watchmaker in Britain to earn a Ph.D. in horology. She lectured at HSNY in 2017.

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Struthers’ “Hands of Time: a Watchmaker’s History of Time” goes big: it attempts to tell the complete story of horology from antiquity onwards. According to a review, Struthers’ academic background makes it possible for her to contextualize recent developments and make us see that they’re nothing new, really–watchmakers have been inventing, scheming, and sometimes cheating, all along. Image 9 shows the British and American editions of the book from our library, which are gorgeously illustrated by the author’s husband Craig, who is also a watchmaker.

Struthers also addresses how the gender gap between so-called “men’s” and “women’s” watches originated in the 19th century and widened from there. Currently, the whole idea of gendered watches is the subject of thriving discussion, with different brands taking distinct approaches to the question of whether and how to market watches based on gender. Although it has not historically been a common topic of scholarship, several recent books focus on women’s watches, including “Jewels of Time: the World of Women’s Watches,” by Roberta Naas.

Struthers says in this New York Times interview: “The industry is still incredibly male, white and middle to upper class, and with that we’re losing so much potential talent.” HSNY addresses this imbalance today by offering scholarships to underrepresented groups including female, Jewish and Black watchmaking students. Although women have always been a presence in horology, I hope this article helps shine a light on women’s continued persistence, and how they have their hands in every part of the industry, from the metal to the marketing.

*The Harper’s article has been credited to Faithfull in other sources, but this seems impossible since it was published in 1869 and Faithfull writes that she first visited America in 1872.

**Thanks to Bob Frishman for compiling some of this information in “Horology’s Great Collectors,” a publication associated with the 2022 NAWCC Annual Time Symposium.

HSNY Featured in Season 2 of HBO's "The Gilded Age"

The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) announces its inclusion in the second season of HBO's acclaimed period drama "The Gilded Age". The show, set in late 19th-century New York City, depicts the rise of the American aristocracy during the Gilded Age, a period of immense economic growth and social upheaval. At the time, New York became a horological hotspot when German emigres specializing in watchmaking flocked to the city. A group of men found comradeship around their mutual interest and formed HSNY in 1866.

In the second season, HSNY is featured as the Uhrmacher Verein der Stadt New York (Watchmakers Association of the City of New York), the German name for the Society used during that time. The show also introduces a new fictional character, Mr. Schubert, Secretary of the Uhrmacher Verein der Stadt New York.

To prepare for his character Jack Trotter’s horological storyline, actor Ben Ahlers took a watchmaking class at HSNY along with series Co-Producer Luke Harlan.

"Historical accuracy is of paramount importance to us at 'The Gilded Age' and so we were thrilled to be able to highlight the Horological Society's role as an essential fixture of the city of New York since its inception in 1866,” said The Gilded Age Co-Producer Luke Harlan. “We were so fortunate to have the expertise and assistance of HSNY and particularly Executive Director Nicholas Manousos as we developed the storyline of Jack and his clock invention for our second season."

“HSNY's inclusion in 'The Gilded Age' serves as a testament to its enduring legacy as a center for horological education and preservation,” said HSNY Deputy Director Carolina Navarro. “The Society's extensive collection, spanning centuries of craftsmanship and innovation, provides a glimpse into the rich history of watchmaking and its profound impact on society, particularly in late 19th-century New York City.”

Tune in to HBO’s “The Gilded Age” here.
Read more about HSNY’s 157-year history here.

Pictured: Jack Trotter (Ben Ahlers) working on his clock invention in season two of The Gilded Age. Credit: HBO/Barbara Nitke.

Introducing 1866: A Fine Fragrance by the Horological Society of New York

 

Ut tensio sic vis

A composition inspired by the rich history of horology, 1866 is crafted to be experienced slowly and opens with the invigorating sensation of crisp alpine air. As the fragrance develops, one finds themselves transported to the eclectic bustle of Midtown Manhattan’s Club Row. The scent of the roasted nut cart on the corner evokes a symphony with cedarwood and tobacco, bringing forth a welcoming warmth reminiscent of days spent in the Society’s library. Distinctly temporal in nature, 1866 finally transforms into an invisible timepiece, enveloping the wrist in supple leather and amber that wears evenly well past a New York minute.

 
 
 

Top Notes

Bergamot / Bitter Orange / Alpine Air

MIDDLE NOTES

Cedarwood / Orange Blossom / Praline

Base Notes

Tobacco / Supple Leather / Amber

— Available in 50ML ($200) & 2ML ($15) —

DEVELOPED & BOTTLED IN NYC, vegan and cruelty-free

All proceeds go towards meeting the Horological Society of New York’s mission of advancing the art and science of horology.

Fragrance FAQ

What does 1866 smell like?

1866 is a unisex fine fragrance inspired by horology. It’s meant to be worn year-round and features notes of Bergamot, Bitter Orange, Alpine Air, Cedarwood, Orange Blossom, Praline, Tobacco, Supple Leather, and Amber to name a few. 1866 will be interpreted by and smell different on everyone and overall will be very personal, much like a timepiece.

Why did HSNY create a fine fragrance?

We’re always looking to innovate at HSNY, all while paying homage to our industry. Both fragrances and timepieces are worn as an accessory on the wrist. Smell (fragrance) is a powerful sense that can transport you to a specific point in time, much like timepieces can mark special occasions in life.

We wanted to explore the intersection of timekeeping and scent. Watches and clocks are often seen as objects of beauty and precision, and fragrance can also be seen as a form of art that evokes memories and emotions. 1866 allowed us a unique way to experience time.

Where did the design inspiration come from?

HSNY buffs may recognize the logo on the presentation box. It’s a reprint of HSNY’s logo from the 1800s! With such a rich 150+ year history, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to honor the Society’s heritage. The emblem with the gears and shield comes from our archives, which you can see in person when you visit the HSNY library. The cap of 1866 also resembles a watch crown. When it’s uncapped and the fragrance is sprayed, you are“set” for the day.

Do you sell the fragrance overseas?

At the moment,1866 can only be shipped within the United States. If you live abroad and want to purchase 1866, please email us at info@hs-ny.org. Due to the nature of the product, refunds will not be available. (That’s why we created a sample size too!)

Reading Time at HSNY: Put It on My Calendar!

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini. 

Maybe you’ll be watching the time ball drop in Times Square on December 31, waiting for the opening notes of “Auld Lang Syne” to start playing over the kissing, crowds, and confetti. Or maybe you’ll be asleep on the sofa, blissfully unaware of the minutes passing as the year turns passively over into 2024.

Whether or not you’re personally focused on the promise that a new year brings, there’s no denying that it’s a moment when people all over the world are uniquely fixated on the time–when, exactly, does something end and something new begin? How do we define what a year is? In this post I’ll focus on calendars: why they are the way they are, how they’ve captivated and frustrated people for centuries, and how they’ve been represented visually on watches. If you’d like a more in-depth education on the topic, I recommend watching the recording of “The History of the Calendar,” a panel that F.P. Journe led at the Horological Society of New York in 2016.

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As long as there have been calendars (at least since ancient Egypt) it seems there have been disagreements over how they should work, and suggestions for their reform. A number of books in our library at HSNY cover the history of calendars, including Michael Judge’s “The Dance of Time: the Origins of the Calendar,” David Ewing Duncan’s “The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens – and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days,” “Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History” by E. G. Richards, and “Marking Time: the Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar,” by Duncan Steel. Incidentally, it seems to me that authors published a rash of these volumes around the turn of the millennium–I wonder why?

One spectacularly illustrated volume in our library is “The Phenomenon Book of Calendars,” originally published in the 1970s. On the back cover, the book boasts: “here, for the first time, all calendar systems past and present have been integrated in one graphically unique publication.” It even comes with a poster (image 1) that features many of these calendars for the years 1978-1979 including, but not limited to: Gregorian, Chinese, Hindu, Hebrew, Islamic, Aztec, Mayan, Roman, Bali, New Guinea, I Ching, and Zodiacal. In our calendar section, we also have books that cover some of these calendars in detail, including “Understanding the Jewish Calendar” and “Une Autre Temps,” which is a French language book about Balinese tika calendars. (A museum note explains how these carved wooden calendars help keep track of festivals and traditions in Bali.)

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In James Atkinson’s “Epitome of the Whole Art of Navigation” (1782), a book in our library that I mentioned in my article about longitude, Atkinson covers the workings of the “Gregorian, or New Calendar” (see image 2, which shows the title page). The Gregorian calendar first replaced the earlier Julian calendar in 1582, so it was hardly “new” when this book came out, but Britain didn’t widely adopt the Gregorian system until the mid-18th century. Atkinson’s book went through many editions where information was added as it became useful.

As Atkinson explains, the chief difference between the two calendars was in the calculation of leap years. The Julian calendar includes a leap year every four years–but that was making the year a little too long on average, throwing off the dates of fixed events like the equinoxes. In the Gregorian reform, some of these leap years have been eliminated. Atkinson methodically instructs his readers on how to use the new calendar to calculate religious holidays, the moon age, and the exact time of high tides, which would have been particularly useful to sailors.

In 1793, French revolutionaries created a brand new calendar with decimal dates, as well as a decimal time system. Heavily symbolic, the calendar started a new era with year One in the year of the revolution (1789), though year One was later changed to the year of the founding of the French Republic (1792); the new system was called the French Republican calendar. French reformers devised the timekeeping system in an attempt to eliminate royal and religious influences and set the country on a more “rational” course. Each week had ten days, although there were still twelve months. Each day was also divided into ten hours with each hour lasting 100 minutes. 

Ferdinand Berthoud, one of the most prominent and innovative European watchmakers of the 18th century, was a member of the committee that chose the winning proposal for decimal time. Below, a photo of a watch by Ferdinand’s nephew Pierre-Louis (Louis) shows how watchmakers in France adapted to the new scheme (image 3). There are ten hours in the center of the dial and a 100-minute track around the outer edge. 

A number of watchmakers even tried to incorporate the new decimal system right alongside the 12-hour system in their designs, resulting in some ingenious, chaotic dial layouts. Image 4 shows an enameled watch dial from 1793-1795, which has both a 10-hour subdial and a 12-hour subdial, as well as a Republican calendar (left) and a Gregorian calendar (right). Both images are from the book “La Révolution Dans la Mesure du Temps,” edited by Catherine Cardinal. The French experiment lasted until around 1806–a turbulent period commemorated in our library by additional titles including “Time and the French Revolution” and “Cadrans de la Révolution.” 

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A well-known American calendar reform effort in the 20th century was the World Calendar, whose chief champion was Elisabeth Achelis. Achelis, a New Yorker who was heir to a rubber company fortune, became utterly (and somewhat inexplicably) obsessed with the idea of calendar reform after hearing a lecture on the subject in 1929. She adopted the cause as her passion and her life’s work.

You can read more about the World Calendar here, but the general idea is that there are four equal quarters of three months each. So far, so familiar. But this calendar regularizes the length of months (so each quarter has 91 days) and adds two additional off-calendar or intercalary days, Worldsday and Leapyear Day. By these alterations, the New Year begins every year on Sunday, the first of January, and each exact date occurs on the same day of the week, every year. You can see a schematic of the calendar in image 5, with the two intercalary holidays sticking out like page flags at the end of the months of June and December.

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In “Of Time and the Calendar,” a 1955 volume in our library (image 6), Achelis claims the World Calendar she proposes would “lower taxes, reduce government costs, help home-budgeting, equalize salary payments” and other benefits. Among other things, paper calendars could be reused indefinitely because the year is the only number on the calendar that would need to be changed. Unfortunately the proposal caused problems for Jews and Christians alike because the intercalary days created two eight-day weeks, which would disturb the observance of the Sabbath.

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In addition to writing several books on the subject of the World Calendar, Achelis started the Journal of Calendar Reform to promote the system, and we have a volume of the journal in our library (image 7). The journal’s cover shows another rendering of the world calendar flanked by the words “order,” “balance,” “stability,” and “harmony.” Although the proposal gained some traction with the League of Nations and later the United Nations, it was never widely adopted. 

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One of the great challenges of watchmaking has been to develop devices to track and display calendar dates that do not need to be frequently reset. Inventors of ingenious modern-day perpetual calendar watches have devised solutions for previously incalculable calendar quandaries. For instance, we have a book about the Vacheron Constantin 57260, which was one of the first watches to feature a Jewish calendar among its 57 (!!!) complications when it debuted in 2015. The Hebrew calendar uses a lunisolar model, meaning both the moon and the sun are taken into account when determining the length of months and years. Other recent complicated models have represented the lunisolar Chinese Traditional Complete calendar, including a 2023 Parmigiani Fleurier watch, and the lunar Hijri calendar that governs Islamic holidays.

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Even among simpler timepieces, many watches and clocks feature moon phases, including the longcase clock at our library at HSNY. Image 8 shows the dial of our clock, with the moon waxing and waning contentedly across the top arc, in this photo nearly at full. If you want to build or repair a calendar watch or a clock with a moon phase mechanism, we have books for that, too! One is pictured in image 9.

Whether you’re excited about January 1, or whether it’s just another day to you, I hope you take a moment to think of the calendar as it flips forward, pulling us all along through our worst years and our best, our funerals, festivals, and our very human attempts to make sense of how time touches us.