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Regulating organs, from past to present – Part Two
History & Masterpieces

Regulating organs, from past to present – Part Two

Tuesday, 05 June 2018
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Vincent Daveau
Journalist, watchmaker and historian

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5 min read

Of all the inventions that have helped improve the precision of mechanical watches, none is more important, or less well-documented, than the development of the regulating organ. To help bridge that gap, we retrace the history of escapements from the earliest devices to the very latest silicon regulators. Part two: from the invention of the balance spring in 1675 to the detached lever escapement in the 1770s.

Encouraged by Renaissance thinking and its men of science, watchmaking advanced considerably during the first half of the seventeenth century. Various treatises, including Tardy’s La montre, les échappements, le spiral et la compensation (The Watch, Escapements, the Balance Spring and Compensation), relate trials of watches fitted with magnetic escapements. The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher is said to have built one circa 1633, as did the Polish Jesuit Kochański in 1659. Robert Hooke is reputed to have made his own attempt in 1669. Still, nothing came of these various experimentations as the invention of the balance spring by Christiaan Huygens on January 23rd 1675, published in France on February 5th of the same year, increased the precision of the albeit imperfect verge escapement by almost one decimal and, more importantly, made it less sensitive to movement.

At the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, the most imaginative watchmakers could reasonably aspire to revolutionise their domain.
The balance spring

Watchmakers began to incorporate Huygen’s spiral spring, no thicker than a human hair and mounted on the balance wheel, into existing timepieces and were able to make substantial improvements to daily rate with effectively very few mechanical modifications. Once watchmakers of the day had realised the importance of having a regulating organ whose oscillations were as isochronous as possible, they turned their attention to finding an escapement which would enable a regular motion of the balance wheel, however the timepiece in question was positioned. At the dawn of the eighteenth century – the Age of Enlightenment with its multiple scientific advancements – the most imaginative watchmakers could reasonably aspire to revolutionise their domain with a machine whose precision would be such that it would rival even the great celestial clock whose regularity was believed to be the work of God’s hand.

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Read part one

Escapements
Regulating organs, from past to present – Part One
Wednesday, 18 April 2018
6 min read
6

George Graham is one of the scholars to have reached these lofty heights. Born in 1673 in the county of Cumbria, England, he learned his trade as a young man, becoming first apprentice then associate of Thomas Tompion, the inventor of the cylinder escapement. Extensively used in the nineteenth century for cheaper, semi-industrialised production before the lever escapement became more widespread, Tompion’s cylinder escapement had its fans, including Breguet. Far superior to the verge or recoil escapement, it functioned without the costly constant-force fusee-and-chain mechanism and later, as part of a Lépine calibre, allowed for fashionably slim constructions.

The lever escapement

As for George Graham, this talented watchmaker and illustrious astronomer is known for his invention of the deadbeat escapement for clocks and of the mercury compensation pendulum. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1722, he took Thomas Mudge as an apprentice; the same Mudge who in 1769 built a watch fitted with a lever escapement. (Abbé Jean de Hautefeuille is said to have already devised a similar escapement in 1722, although this colourful character is credited with numerous ideas, most of which reposed on theory more than practical application). George Graham also assisted John Harrison, a carpenter and self-taught watchmaker, in his quest to build a clock for use in calculating longitude at sea. It’s also thanks to Graham that Harrison was able to build the grasshopper escapement that equipped his first marine timekeeper, the H1. This was a complex construction in its finished form, in 1736, but a functional one nonetheless. Even so, Harrison abandoned the grasshopper escapement and replaced it with a verge escapement in his seagoing H4 watch – which Larcum Kendall would have the difficult task of copying.

Come the mid-eighteenth century, it became clear that existing escapements were unable to offer precision over a prolonged period.

It became clear, come the mid-eighteenth century, that existing escapements were unable to offer precision over a prolonged period. Their design permitted exploits and records but implied a degree of intricacy which made them effectively impossible to reproduce. In an age when thoughts were turning to industrialisation and serial production, these old escapements, either because they were difficult to make or because they lacked in precision, had done their time. By 1750, all the great master watchmakers, whether Pierre Leroy in France, Ferdinand Berthoud in Switzerland or England’s John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw, were convinced that the detached escapement, i.e. one which has the least contact with the balance, was the way forward if they were ever to build mechanisms that would measure time with lasting precision.

Thomas Mudge is credited with the invention of the detached lever escapement for watches. It’s also said he disclosed the details of Harrison’s marine clocks to Ferdinand Berthoud, sent by France to bring back information about them. Not to pour fuel on the fire, we can note that Pierre Leroy has gone down in posterity for a marine clock (1766) with a detached escapement combining elements of a lever and a detent escapement, an isochronous balance spring and a thermally compensated balance. Leroy’s clock marks a turning point in the history of time measurement which we leave poised to enter the modern era.

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