Plus, if there had been no night table or light in the room, the owner of such a precious piece would have been forced to feel about in the dark for the watch and risk breaking it by accident. They would sleep in a half-seated position and their room would normally be bathed in the light of a candle (of wax or tallow, depending on income), which was placed near the bed. To begin with, someone who could afford a minute repeater at the time did not sleep as we do nowadays. These notions are comical and fail to takethe habits of the past into consideration. Chronograph balance fine swan's neck fine adjustment and Breguet overcoil. Quality movement with two hammers and two gongs. Potter & Co, Geneva: a beautiful watch with a hinged cover typical of the end of the 19 th century. This would suggest that they, the writers, are outstanding experts in mechanics but not well-versed in social sciences and the underlying values of the Age of Enlightenment.
Some authors still believe that minute repeater watches were used to tell the time at nightfall before the invention of luminescent hands. Most of these stories sound a little folkloric or even far-fetched. Many things have been written about the origins of the minute repeater. A typical and well-made timepiece with a visible repeater mechanism, hour star, minute rack and quarter snail. Their thinness and location on the edge of the movement, made it possible to reduce the thickness of the cases and therefore give the pieces a perfectly contemporary and fashionable look.īuty repeater, ca. Mudge’s minute repeater was a definite improvement, but this highly complicated mechanism was to undergo further refining in the workshop of the great Abraham-Louis Breguet, who developed gongs. He was the apprentice of George Graham and a contemporary of John Harrison, and became famous as the inventor of the lever escapement. Thomas Mudge (1715-1794) is said to have created an improved version of the minute repeater. This type of innovation undoubtedly aroused the interest of the elites and prompted the proliferation of further developments. The leather case holding the watch has holes to let the chiming sound be heard.Īccording to the authors of seminal works in horology, it was the English watchmaker Daniel Quare (1649-1724) who invented the minute repeater. Julien Leroy Montre de Carrosse: striking watch with an hour hand that indicates the chiming hour. The most ancient minute repeater we know of until now is a piece produced around 1710 in Friedberg, Germany. Beautiful mechanism (anonymous): two gongs and a see-through actuating mechanism through the back. Pocket watch with long chain used for winding the chime. Firstly, who invented the complication, and, secondly, what prompted watchmakers to create such complex instruments for striking the hours. However, when talking about minute repeaters two major questions arise.
This privilege also explains, no doubt, why collectors find this complication so captivating.
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