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Inside workshops, watchmakers assemble movements by hand, working with components often smaller than a millimeter, where tolerances are measured in microns.
It’s this level of skilled, painstaking craftsmanship that has defined Switzerland as a global hub for luxury watchmaking.
Much of the value in high-end mechanical watches comes from what are known as complications, additional functions built into the movement beyond telling the time. These include chronographs, which measure elapsed time, perpetual calendars that automatically adjust for different month lengths and leap years, and tourbillons, which are a rotating mechanism designed to improve accuracy by counteracting the effects of gravity.
The most complex watches can combine several of these functions into a single mechanism, sometimes made up of hundreds or even thousands of individual parts.
The foundations of this industry date back several centuries, developing into a decentralized system across Switzerland.
Watch journalist and collector Robert Jan Broer explains how that system evolved.
“Switzerland is the heart of watchmaking basically, and what happened is that there were a lot of farmers in Switzerland, and during summer they were farmers, but in the winter they had to find different things, so they started making little parts of watches and clocks and become suppliers to watch brands that basically collected all these parts from different farmers or watchmakers or watch part makers in Switzerland and put them together and then sell them worldwide.”
What Broer is describing began in Geneva in the mid-1500s, when strict religious rules limited the wearing of jewelry, pushing skilled metalworkers to focus on watches instead.
Over time, watchmaking spread beyond the city into rural areas, where people began producing small parts at home during the winter months, when farming work slowed down.
Those individual parts were then brought together by watchmakers, who assembled complete watches and sold them.
By the 1700s, this system had grown into a structured industry, with different areas specializing in different parts of the process, some focused on making springs, others on cases, and others on assembling and finishing the final watch.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.