A Trip Down The World's Best Watchmakers House

You’re wrong if you thought the world’s most priceless and exquisite timepieces were made in the decadent streets of Geneva. These pieces are beautifully articulated in a small mountain town of Switzerland.

Le Chaux-de-Fonds isn’t your usual tourist town. It is located, 1,000m up in the Jura mountains – one of Switzerland’s most scenic regions. With a breathtaking view of the mountains and the clouds this town is packed with small tourist attractions but nothing fancy. It has various Art Nouveau apartment block lobbies. It has been home to various famous names such as Louis Chevrolet, the motor company-founding race car driver who was born and raised here,  Blaise Cendrars, the father of literary modernism, poet and filmmaker and Le Corbusier, the father of architectural modernism.

This town is a practical, hard-working town who isn’t into much showing off. Hence there are high chances if you haven’t heard of this town. Few watch lovers will know that La Chaux-de-Fonds is essentially the watchmaking capital of the world, home to the workshops or corporate headquarters of Rolex and Patek Philippe, Tissot and Girard-Perregaux, Ebel and Omega, many of which were founded here.

Daniel Jean Richard was the first to develop a system of apprenticeship and cultivated watchmaking as a local cottage industry. Karl Max too has mentioned this town as an example of efficient industrialisation in his seminal work Das Kapital, saying that in his day, this small town was producing five times the number of watches than in all Geneva’s workshops combined.

Today, La Chaux-de-Fonds remains to be the heart of the Swiss watchmaking industry.

Many of the original workshops have been turned into apartments now. However, small open-door shops still populate the streets, where third- and fourth-generation craftspeople continue to make the mainsprings, bridges and balance cocks that power some of the world's most exquisite and pricey timepieces.

This town is also home to the International Clock-making Museum. One of the most notable pieces of that this museum houses is a pocket watch designed between 1796 and 1800 by Breguet told the time with little pins that would jab its owner in hand, allowing him to check the time without pulling it out of his pocket and potentially revealing his boredom to the person — boss, emperor or spouse — in whose company he found himself.

The museum also has the world’s first quartz timepiece: the upright, four-drawer filing cabinet-sized contraption that almost killed La Chaux-de-Fonds. In 1968, the majority of the working population, 11,000 people were employed by these watchmaking companies. By 1975, this number dropped a little bit to 7,000 as people struggled to maintain their job with the advent of quartz watches.

Watchmakers had been working hard for centuries to keep time as precisely as possible, perfecting the basic mechanical system of transferring energy from a coiled spring through an escapement to the balance wheel to create as close to perfectly regular oscillation as possible. And they got pretty good, with watches that were accurate to within seconds a day.

But quartz technology, which took advantage of the mineral’s much more stable rate of oscillation, made watches accurate to within seconds a year – at prices in the dozens, rather than the hundreds or thousands of dollars being charged for mechanical Swiss watches in the 1970s.

One would think that Swiss watches had met its end until some executives by Patek Philippe’s Philippe Stern, decided they could compete on luxury and craftsmanship rather than accuracy. Finally, Swiss watched regained its glory. How well can craftsmanship measure up against technology, only time will tell.

An ordinary watchmaker will approximately earn 6,500 euro watch after working for the company for two years.  One could expect them to be more stylish and sport their luxury watch. But this town, home to young watchmakers and modest lifestyles, they would be wearing less expensive Swiss brands like Certina or Hamilton.

La Chaux-de-Fonds is a different kind of Switzerland. It is hard-working, modest and straightforward. No matter how much the outside world and the watchmaking industry evolves with its fancy watches, this town and its people will go on making its living through hard work.

A pure gem amidst the Swiss mountains- La Chaux-de-Fonds.