Part One: The Lost Architects of Time
Revisiting the forgotten innovators whose ideas built modern horology.
In our hyper-modern world, fame has mutated. Once it belonged to monarchs, explorers, inventors, and heroes immortalized in epics and stone. Now it wears ring lights and hashtags. Culture rewards those who are seen, not always those who built anything.
Horology is no different. Our collective memory bends toward the mythos of brands, the talismans worn by astronauts and actors, the icons splashed across glossy billboards and auction listings. I say that knowing full well I play a small role in that media machine. But that is not the story that pulls at me.
What excites me, and what I have learned deeply through Jack and through my own education in both history and mechanics, is that the evolution of timekeeping is not a straight line written by a handful of celebrated geniuses. It is a labyrinth.
And yet only a few names echo. Daniels. Journe. Genta. Harrison. Breguet. Mudge. Important, yes. Giants, certainly. But hardly alone. Beneath every visible signature is a scaffold of invisible hands. There are forgotten architects of time just as there are forgotten architects of philosophy, war, science, and art, innovators whose fingerprints remain on balance wheels and escapements while their names faded from dials.
Watchmaking is full of ghosts: engineers whose mathematics made resonance, lubrication, and miniaturization possible, thinkers who saw the cosmos in a gear train, craftsmen who labored in quiet ateliers so someone else’s logo could shine.
There is a paradox in horological history, the gap between fame and function. Some brands became giants through marketing rather than mechanics, outsourcing their movements and borrowing innovations from quieter minds. Only recently has watch journalism begun to dig deeper, to look past the stainless steel sports watch glow and ask who actually advanced the craft.
The Invisible Lineage of Innovation
Watchmaking has always been a cumulative art, a slow and stubborn layering of ideas across centuries. The escapement did not emerge fully formed, nor did the rotor, nor the silicon oscillator. These were not revolutions in isolation but chapters in a long intellectual dialogue. Huygens answers Galileo, Harrison refines Huygens, Daniels studies Harrison, and the next generation studies Daniels while also peering into laboratories where silicon breathes life into new frequency standards.
The irony in developing and curating a list of forgotten characters in history is that you will in turn end up forgetting people. Every fan of horology’s history, I am sure, has an obscure person or two they think should be on this list of forgotten heroes, but it’s my list. How did we get here, and how did this ragtag group of people come to be?
I always had a few figures I kept in the back of my mind, names scribbled in margins, anecdotes stored away from footnotes and catalog essays, but it wasn’t until my recent story on ultra-thin watchmaking that the idea began to take form.
Before I could even think of names, I needed a structure. What made these people forgotten? What kind of contribution qualifies—an invention, an innovation, a philosophy, or sheer curiosity? That’s where the framework began to crystallize. I kept returning to Daniel Boorstin’s trilogy The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers, which divides history not by chronology but by temperament. That became my scaffolding. The discoverers of time were the explorers of mechanism and measurement; the creators were the designers and engineers who gave time physical form; the seekers were the thinkers, the dreamers, the ones trying to understand what time means.
So I began to look backward. I took some of horology’s most celebrated ideas—deadbeat seconds, resonance, the automatic winding system, the chronograph—and traced them to their origins. I wanted to see who was there first, who built the foundation before history assigned credit elsewhere.
I found myself retracing the paths of innovation to people like Antide Janvier, who pioneered the use of resonance in clocks centuries before it became a talking point in modern independent watchmaking. Jean-Moïse Pouzait, who designed one of the earliest detached escapements and helped bridge the gap between precision horology and the modern chronograph. And Albert Pellaton, whose winding system transformed IWC’s engineering language yet whose name rarely leaves the footnotes.
We like to tell history as if it turns on singular figures and singular moments. The lone genius at a bench, the epiphany at midnight. But progress in timekeeping has rarely worked that way. It moves like a tide. It pulls, it overlaps, it advances by degree and refinement, through anonymous breakthroughs and quiet corrections made by minds who never expected their names to be remembered.
This series is an act of looking again.
The Cast of Forgotten Architects
The Discoverers: Those who measured, mapped, and revealed the hidden laws of time. Their curiosity made time knowable.
Jost Bürgi (Late 1500’s) was a Swiss clockmaker, instrument maker, and mathematician whose work blurred the boundary between mechanics and mathematics. Working at the courts of Kassel and Prague, he invented the cross-beat escapement and remontoire, making clocks accurate enough for astronomy. His machines were not trophies but instruments: celestial globes, armillary spheres, orreries. Bürgi reminds us that to measure time is also to measure the cosmos. Long before wristwatches or branding, he was building the instruments of time as a science. His work eventually landed in the lap of none other than Kepler.
Antide Janvier (Late 1700’s) saw the heavens not as abstractions but as clockwork. His astronomical clocks breathed with planetary rhythm, machines that rivaled Breguet in brilliance and nearly in fame. As a teenager he built an astronomical sphere which he presented to the Academy of Sciences of Besançon, which won him much praise and set him on a course to become Louis XVI’s royal clockmaker. Janvier is the daddy of the double pendulum clocks, otherwise known as resonance clocks. While imprisoned after the French Revolution his watches, equipment and designs were sold to none other than Mr. Abraham Louis Breguet. A man who built the universe in brass and almost vanished into it.
Ludwig Oechslin (1980’s to Present) lives at the intersection of philosophy and machinery. A watchmaker, a historian, a priest of cosmic mechanics, he treats complications not as status symbols but as intellectual puzzles waiting for elegant reduction. As stated by Ariel Adams, he is one of “those rare polymath mechanical geniuses responsible for some of the wilder calendar and astronomical watches of the last few decades.” His work with Ulysse Nardin bent astronomical cycles into wrist-worn logic, calendars that flow with natural intuition rather than brute mechanical force. Oechslin’s journey into horology started when he restored a long-broken astronomical clock at the Vatican and was cemented when he designed “The Trilogy” for UN which comprised of the much celebrated Astrolabium Galileo Galilei, the Planetarium, and the Tellurium.
Pierre Genequand (1980’s) was not supposed to change watchmaking. He was a physicist studying air bearings and fluid dynamics, not escapements. But he saw something no one else did: friction was not inevitable. At CSEM he conceived a silicon oscillating system so efficient it seemed to work without resistance, a mechanical dream that could have rewritten power reserve and precision. His breakthrough arrived centuries after Huygens, but the industry hesitated and his vision stalled. According to Jack it is the closest thing to Harrison’s “grasshopper” escapement despite Genequand never even knowing such escapement existed. He touched the edge of frictionless time then watched it evaporate into prototypes and patents.
The Creators: Those who built, shaped, and gave form to the unseen. Their genius made time tangible.
Jules Pouzait (Late 1700’s) solved a problem before the world fully understood it. He gave watches independent seconds, unlocking precise timing seconds before the chronograph era. It was an innovation ahead of its moment, a brilliant detour in the road toward modern chronometry. He was among the first on the European continent to introduce a variation of the lever escapement, a design by Thomas Mudge. The specific “Pouzait escapement” utilized a “divided lift” and was noted for its use with a large, seconds-beating balance. His invention flickers today in complications most collectors take for granted. Every dead-beat second and chronograph owes a trace to his vision.
Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1700’s) was one of the eighteenth century’s most ambitious mechanical minds. His workshop produced clocks, watches, and above all automata that could write, draw, and play music with a precision that astonished Europe’s courts and scientific circles. These machines demonstrated early mechanical logic and programmed movement, leading some historians to regard them as precursors to the computer. His clocks often concealed scenes activated at the strike, including the famous shepherd automaton who played melodies on a flute while a dog approached and reacted. Modern jacquemarts and animated complications trace their lineage to his work. Jaquet-Droz stands as proof that the foundations of mechanical ingenuity long predate industrial automation.
Frédéric Piguet’s (early 1900’s) calibers powered icons from Patek Philippe to Audemars Piguet to Blancpain. Piguet was the master of the ultra-thin with his caliber 21 taking the prize as one of the most influential in history. Yet, this horological architect was content to let others live in the houses he built. In an industry that prizes signatures, his signature lived beneath the dial, engraved in bridges only watchmakers ever see. His manufacture was eventually swallowed up by Blancpain and the Swatch group. To understand modern haute horology is to trace the outlines of a name that almost never appears on the front.
John Harwood (1920’s) was not trained as a watchmaker. He was a schoolteacher who saw soldiers return from World War I with dust-choked trench watches and wondered why time should depend on winding vulnerable crowns. His answer was the first commercially available automatic wristwatch. Yet Harwood lost his patents and his fortune, watching his invention rise without him. A man who gave time freedom, only to be forgotten by it.
Albert Pellaton (1950’s) believed a movement should not merely beat but breathe, storing energy with every subtle gesture of the wrist. Pellaton was the man behind the highly efficient bi-directional winding system, otherwise known as the cam and pawl automatic winding system. It dramatically improved efficiency vs the early bumper system of Harwood. His winding system for IWC transformed motion into life, turning a watch into a companion rather than a hostage to the crown. Pellaton gave mechanical watches lungs, and today every self-winding rotor owes him a debt it rarely acknowledges.
The Seekers: Those who questioned tradition, reimagined the rules, and looked beyond the known horizon. Their imagination made time human again.
Jean Richard (1600’s) occupies a space between fact and folklore. Legend casts him as the shepherd/goldsmith/horse trader-turned-horologist who brought French craft into the Jura. Here, myth and truth blur. What is certain is that in 1691 at the age of 19, he opened a watch workshop near Le Locle and he defied the power of the watchmakers’ guilds that controlled the industry. The guilds were exclusive and followed strict rules that protected their power and restrained competition. Richard introduced division of labor to the industry, a system known as établissage. He taught the local farmers to make watch components, each specializing in producing certain parts, with final assembly by master watchmakers. Whether one man or many, he stands as an emblem of an origin we romanticize but seldom interrogate.
Vincent Calabrese has always been a rebel in a polite industry. He challenged convention, treated independence as a principle rather than a marketing line, and insisted the movement should be seen, understood, and structurally celebrated. Born in Naples in 1944, he began repairing clocks at fourteen in a corner of his family home, then moved to Le Locle in 1961, finding work at Tissot, Cyma, Zenith, and Hebdomas. In 1977 he won a gold medal at the Geneva Inventors Fair for a linear movement that became the foundation of Corum’s Golden Bridge, launched in 1980. His work explored “spatial” watchmaking, movements shaped as letters or symbols, bridges suspended in space rather than buried under plates. Later he developed Calasys, a system replacing the traditional balance spring with elastic blades, challenging one of horology’s most fundamental components. Calabrese remains a cornerstone of independent watchmaking: part engineer, part iconoclast, treating the movement as architecture and design as argument.
Andreas Strehler is often called the “watchmaker for a few,” and for good reason. The handlebar mustache helps his mystique, but it is the work that truly sets him apart. Strehler is a living bridge between the earliest mechanical workshops and the furthest edge of horological possibility. Strehler’s journey is marked by a series of quietly radical machines. In 2007 he designed the movement for Harry Winston’s Opus 7 and continuation of the Zwei. The “Papillon” of 2008 demonstrated his philosophy of transparency and mechanical exposure, while the “Cocon” of 2012 introduced a new architectural platform for his work. In 2013 he unveiled the “Sauterelle” with a patented remontoir d’égalité that delivers constant force to the escapement and maintains linear balance amplitude across its seventy-eight hour reserve. If time has architects, Strehler is both apprentice and futurist.
Rewriting The Story And Restoring The Lineage
To study horology only through the names printed on dials is to see history through a keyhole. The story is larger, stranger, richer. It is built not just by icons, but by individuals who solved problems no one else could see, who worked far from the spotlight, and who left behind mechanisms more eloquent than any marketing campaign.
This first chapter has been about recognition, not nostalgia, and not romanticism, but clarity. Progress in timekeeping has never belonged to a single lineage or a single nation or a single era. It has always been a relay, passed hand to hand across centuries, across workshops and laboratories and kitchen tables, from cloistered mathematicians to stubborn farmers shaping steel in winter barns.
The modern collector world is louder than ever. Releases, auctions, ambassadors, thumbnails, countdowns, hype cycles. But beneath all of it there remains this quieter truth: every watch today exists because someone you have possibly never heard of refused to accept that time could not be measured, improved, refined, understood.
We owe them the courtesy of remembering.