Acceleration
The automobile magnate had no idea that he was headed into a horological battle even as he emerged out front. In 1917, the year after Ward took possession of his extraordinary tabernacle of time, his Patek Philippe with its sixteen complications, he received yet another wondrous little timepiece from the watchmaker. Encased in eighteen-carat gold, this pocket watch, with the movement no. 174623, featured a perpetual calendar and indicated the phases of the moon. Mechanically flawless, the watch was also deeply personal. With Warren, Ohio, at the center of his universe, Ward had requested an additional mechanism to indicate the exact hour that the sun rose and set each day over his beloved hometown.
In Geneva, Patek Philippe’s artisans and technicians consulted with scientists and astronomers. While the astronomical event occurred daily across the globe, the exact time varied not only throughout the year but every twenty-four hours due to a variety of factors: the Earth’s axial tilt, the movement of the planets in their elliptical rotation around the sun, and one’s position on the planet. In order to craft the mechanism, the watchmakers needed to calculate Warren’s exact latitude and longitude. After working out its many particulars, with each data point computed manually, Patek Philippe produced a satisfyingly beautiful instrument.
Under the dial sat two hand-crafted, toothed sections embedded with minuscule differentiated gears—just a few millimeters apart—placed delicately upon an extension axle where the minute and hour hands pointed to when the sun rose and set. The specially designed cams were calibrated to rotate once a day over 365 (and one-fourth) days annually. They indicated both sunrise and sunset within five minutes. (Had it not been for local atmospheric influences, the watchmakers could have shaved off even more time.) When Ward commissioned this singular watch, he was traveling frequently to Detroit, where his automobile company had relocated and where he was expected to spend a great deal of time. He didn’t enjoy extended stints outside his familiar sphere, and removing the timepiece from his pocket to gauge the sun’s ritual path over Warren undoubtedly gave him a connection to home.
In the nearly two decades since Ward had built his very first horseless carriage, the Model A, the Packard Motor Company had gone from a cottage industry to America’s first luxury brand. While Ward had nearly everything to do with making Packard the marque of engineering and artistic perfection, the company’s phenomenal growth was due in no small part to the massive efforts of Henry Bourne Joy.
The son of James Frederick Joy, a Michigan railroad magnate who had hired the attorney Abraham Lincoln for his first major case, involving the Illinois Central, Henry Bourne Joy was born into privilege. One of the “Princes of Griswold Street,” Joy had graduated from Yale, married into one of Detroit’s wealthiest families (the Newberrys), and invested in steamship lines, sugar refineries, real estate, and railroad companies. A veteran of the Spanish-American War, he had become intensely interested in technology in general and the automobile in particular.
In 1900 Joy traveled to New York City with his brother-in-law Truman Newberry to take a look at horseless carriages. While they were inspecting a steam-driven vehicle, the water-pressure gauge exploded in their faces. Suitably turned off steam-propelled cars, they went to visit the Adams & McMurtry car showroom and came upon two Packards idling at the curb just as a fire engine charged past. When Joy inquired whether the cars might start—a considerable issue with motorcars at the time—he was invited to “jump in.” As the story goes, not only did the Packard start on command, but the men raced off in hot pursuit of the fire engine. The episode so astonished Joy that he and Newberry both bought Packards on the spot. Returning to Detroit, Joy ordered a second Packard, the new Model F, with a blue body, red wheels, and polished brass work, for $2,500 ($64,634 today), an event deemed so newsworthy that the Detroit Journal ran the headline “New Automobile Which Harry Joy Has Ordered” on November 7, 1901.
Beyond impressed, Joy not only drove his Packard to Warren the following year, but he sank $25,000 (roughly $621,489 today) into the Ohio Automobile Company. At the time Ward and his brother, like most automakers of the day, were quite anxious for outside capital. In the process of expanding, they began building a new 32,000-square-foot factory in anticipation of greater capacity, but were quickly burning through their cash reserves at a time when bankers still remained unconvinced of the industry and viewed its financing as a fool’s game. As a result, many of the early pioneers had already begun to disappear. Joy’s cash infusion sealed the Packard’s survival. Coolly, Ward noted in his diary on July 1, 1902, “Joy here.”
Very quickly Joy began visiting regularly with Ward, providing his views on vehicle models and manufacturing, and he soon ratcheted up his investment in the firm to $100,000 (some $2.5 million today). Not long after the Ohio Automobile Company incorporated as the Packard Motor Car Company in September 1902, Joy brought in a number of his wealthy Detroit friends and family as investors. Total capitalization of the new venture was now $400,000 (roughly $9.9 million today), and the classic shift between the quixotic founder and the visionary money managers began. Joy and his associates now owned a controlling $250,000 (about $6.2 million today) interest, while Ward, his family, and original shareholders like George Weiss held on to the remaining $150,000 (about $3.7 million today). Ward and Will plowed a great chunk of their money back into Packard Electric.
Joy provided more than just working capital (the company increased its output to produce one motorcar per day); he maneuvered a reluctant Ward to move Packard Motor from Warren to Detroit with the expectation that Ward, as president, would relocate as well, continuing his role in the operations of the company. As Joy wrote to Ward in January 1903, “I want you and we all want you to be the whole thing in the Packard Co.”
Until October 1903, when the Packard Motor Car Company officially moved to Detroit, nearly every component of the Packard automobile was manufactured in Warren. Initially Ward gave his assurances to Joy and the other Packard investors that he would indeed relocate to the new Detroit factory. In fact he began the process of selling Packard Electric for $200,000 (some $4.7 million today) to the Lamp Trust, freeing himself up for the move.
The pioneering industrial architect Albert Kahn was contracted to design the new factory on East Grand Boulevard. Unlike his contemporaries, Kahn, the son of an itinerant rabbi who had emigrated to Detroit from Germany in 1884, believed that meeting the functional needs of industrial design was every bit as innovative and honorable as erecting mansions and monuments. At the time, early auto plants, like the early Victorian mills, were dirty, cramped, dark, and inefficient. Kahn’s Packard factory was unlike anything ever seen. Built of reinforced concrete and glass, it was impressively clean, open, well-proportioned, and naturally bright. The sunlight poured through the factory in fat beams. Considered to be the most modern automobile manufacturing facility in the world, it caught the attention of Henry Ford. Soon the Flivver King commissioned Kahn to design his Highland Park factory, a gargantuan facility nearly two-thirds glass, where the Model T was perfected and the assembly line introduced.
Once the Packard Factory was completed and the first cars readied for manufacture, Ward announced that he had had a change of heart. Joy had been in constant contact with him over the factory, selecting its superintendent, and along with engineer Charles Schmidt received Ward’s outlines for the first automobile to come out of the new factory. Initially he told Joy that he needed to stay in Warren to oversee the close of his deal with the Lamp Trust. According to Joy, Ward explained that, unless he agreed to remain behind to manage the electric factory, the Lamp Trust would not only forfeit the down payment they had made on the deal but would withdraw the offer. Since he could not run two manufacturing factories in two different cities simultaneously, Ward chose home.
Both Ward and Joy shared a belief in quality and an insistence on continued research and testing, but a subtle friction over philosophy had surfaced between the two men. Besides uprooting the company to Detroit, Joy directed the move toward bigger, multicylinder engines and a strategy of building one luxury model annually. Ward, the classic engineer, passionate about complicated pocket watches, held that the simplest solution was the best for car design. He once told a reporter, “More than one cylinder on a Packard would be like two tails on a cat—you just don’t need it.”
Other issues arose between Ward and the moneymen from Detroit. Since Joy’s glittering circle had invested in Packard, Ward’s authority had waned considerably. A brittle tension between the two principals erupted as Packard began its transformation into a great company, forcing Ward to reconsider his role. By July 1918 Ward, who had already reduced his presence in the firm, had decided to withdraw from the company altogether, but Joy prevailed upon him to remain.
It was an uneasy rapprochement. Much to Joy’s dismay, Ward did not move to Detroit as Joy had hoped and traveled there only for board meetings and other events. As the years wore on, Ward’s “inborn shyness” got the better of him and he journeyed there less and less, finding the meetings excruciatingly painful. Mistakenly, Joy and other company executives interpreted Ward’s reluctance to visit Detroit and take part in the company’s management as indifference to company affairs, but his wife, Elizabeth, later explained, “He worried himself sick whenever he had to go to Detroit. His shyness caused him more suffering than most people realized.” In 1909 Ward stepped down as president, staying on as a major shareholder and chairman of the board. Joy took over as president.6 In 1915 Ward formally resigned from active participation in Packard affairs. Alvan Macauley, a Lehigh graduate and former head of the American Arithometer Company, stepped in as Packard’s new president. Three years later Ward had put Detroit behind him.
Ward and the new president of Packard Motor Company, Alvan Macauley (right), in front of the factory on East Grand Avenue, Detroit, 1915. Courtesy of Betsy Solis.
Where Ward was dispirited by the public engagement his role had required as Packard grew, Henry B. Joy grabbed the opportunity and became a devoted promoter of the Packard. He spoke to Congress on behalf of the industry, forcefully lobbying for tariffs on foreign cars to protect domestic companies whose labor was said to cost two and a half times that of Europeans. Personally demonstrating that the Packard was quite simply “one of the best in the country,” he drove from a Detroit showroom to one in New York in three days flat.
Within ten years of moving to Detroit, the Packard factory had grown to 3.5 million square feet, with its own water tower, lumberyards, research laboratories, canteens, and seven thousand workers. It had become the largest manufacturer of luxury cars on the planet. In 1902, the year before the company moved, the Warren factory had produced 192 cars and posted a loss of $200,000 ($4.9 million today). By 1912 the company had orders worth $14 million (more than $312 million in today’s terms), and the Packard Motor Car Company would not experience financial woes for the next twenty-five years.
Detroit was now the undisputed capital of America’s automobile industry. Packard’s move, wrote a journalist nine years after the event, had been “the connecting link between the romance of the geniuses and the romance of the industry.” The days of cranking out horseless vehicles in wooden sheds were long past; now sleek automobiles were rolling out of gleaming factories. The auto industry had gone from a speculator’s game and a toy for the rich to become a generator of wealth accepted at the pinnacle of American society. At the twelfth annual Automobile Club of America banquet held at the Waldorf-Astoria on December 20, 1911, the guest of honor was none other than President Howard Taft.
While James Ward Packard had done much to engineer the automobile, Henry Ford made it possible for the greatest number of people to afford them. Ford priced his cars reasonably and in 1914 announced that he was raising the minimum wage at his factories to five dollars a day—well over twice the the pay of most—enabling his employees to purchase the cars they built. As wages soared, so did automobile sales. The increase in mobility and incomes helped push home ownership. Automobiles and trucks completely altered the production and distribution of the entire spectrum of consumer goods, and prices dropped considerably. Variety and quality increased, as did purchasing power among a growing middle class. From houses to food to clothing to the cars themselves, the automobile enabled millions of American consumers to buy products and services that had once been luxuries for the wealthy.
In 1908, when General Motors’ founder William C. Durant pronounced that 500,000 cars would eventually run across the country’s roads, most believed these were the musings of a crank. The naysayers found themselves on the wrong side of history. The impact the automobile had on social mobility and the effect that mobility had on society was astonishing. No longer tied to train schedules or the restrictions of a horse-drawn carriage, individuals could now travel where they wanted and when they wanted. Before the car, most people had never traveled beyond a fifty-mile radius. The limitations of transportation meant that most communities had developed within fifteen miles of a railroad or waterway. The car narrowed the geographical divide between city and rural life and paved the way for the suburbs.
American automobile manufacturers catered to every spectrum of society. General Motors would spearhead the concept of aspirational consumption, creating several tiers of automobiles based on price and style categories, from the low-priced volume car, the Chevrolet, up to the Oldsmobile and Buick and finally to the luxury lines of a Cadillac.
The Packard’s elegant Goddess of Speed hood ornament remains one of the most enduring symbols in automobile history. Photograph by Stacy Perman.
As for the Packard, its reputation was peerless. In a Fortune magazine article on the automobile industry, the writer exclaimed that, next to the Ford Motor Company, Packard “was the most valuable name in the auto industry.” Although removed from operational management, Ward had begun nearly all of the guiding principles that brought the company to preeminence. Beginning with the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal, his numerous innovations all became industry standards. He established a corporate genetic code based on technological and aesthetic exceptionalism (the Packard was said to be a gentleman’s car built by gentlemen); he implemented innovative and rigorous testing and research facilities. Ward gave consumers cars that elevated their status, products that they hadn’t known they needed or wanted, and he understood the importance of nurturing their comfort level as they became accustomed to new and sweeping phenomena. Just as he had reassured his lightbulb customers at Packard Electric, Ward had made automobile expertise and repairs available through strong dealer relationships as well as pioneering sales and advertising strategies. A network of elegant Packard dealerships sprouted up all over the country, many of them resembling industrial palaces or movie sets, with glamorous showrooms displaying the cars and backrooms where servicing and repairs took place. The company’s marketing and advertising department produced perhaps some of the most beautiful corporate literature ever generated; there were leather booklets and owner manuals, and the German artist Henry A. Thiede illustrated calendars, catalogues, and countless editions of The Packard magazine. All played off Ward’s now unmistakable utterance, “Ask the man who owns one.”
Packard executives well understood the importance their customers played in promoting the Packard brand, and the marketing department kept comprehensive lists filled with copious details on them: William K. Vanderbilt bought his first Packard in 1911, and William Randolph Hearst in 1917. W. F. R. Murie, head of the Hershey Chocolate Company, bought his first Packard around 1910 and in the course of thirty-five years purchased forty-five in all, even custom-painting one to match the color of a chocolate bar. The company also kept a list titled “Prominent Packard Owners of Long Standing,” which catalogued every head of state, monarch, and potentate who owned a Packard; the list would come to include Chiang Kai-shek, the shah of Iran, the queens of England and Spain, the emperor of Japan, Czar Nicholas II of Russia, the Aga Khan, General George Patton, Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and Hollywood royalty such as Clark Gable.
More than merely documenting its patrons, Packard publicly traded on the people who owned one. As America’s plutocracy broadened, Packard’s marketers cleverly paid a none too subtle homage to Mrs. Astor’s famously exclusive ballroom with the advertisement, “The Packard Four Hundred,” a beautifully produced roster celebrating those families who had owned Packard cars for twenty-one years or more. Similarly, the company promoted its “Famous Packard Gateways,” an attractive catalogue of the stately front gates of famous Packard owners across the country.
• • •
In the years immediately following his decision to step down at Packard Motor Company, Ward accelerated his watch collecting. Between 1914 and 1920 he acquired dozens of watches, filling his desire for engineering perfection with complicated mechanical timepieces. His diary, functioning more like a ledger, became dotted with his minimalist entries, noting his visits to Wittenaur’s, the Swiss firm on West Thirty-sixth Street in New York City, meetings with his longtime dealer F. E. Armitage, and random notations on a price, feature, or movement number. In 1915 he acquired an eighteen-carat gold tourbillon escapement pocket watch, movement no. 500–2, from S. Smith & Son. The following year, the British house delivered the automaker an eighteen-carat gold timepiece, movement no. 211682, with a split-second stopwatch, made of nonmagnetizable materials, considered a highly unusual request for the day.
Ward’s grande complication had done little to sate his passion. The more watches he acquired, the more interested he became in discovering novel approaches to timekeeping, to see just how far he could push the labyrinthine inner workings of a complicated watch. The more watches he commissioned, the more obsessed he became.
The man who believed that simplicity stood at the crux of car design thrilled at combining the greatest number of complications within the very limited case of a pocket watch. Throughout history the most important watchmakers pursued their craft the same way that Ward approached mechanical engineering: obsessed with perfection, tirelessly developing new complications, and all the while relentlessly refining existing solutions.
Although he enjoyed the classic complications such as perpetual calendars, moon phase indicators, and split-second chronographs, Ward was particularly enchanted with minute repeaters, the chiming mechanisms that allowed the wearer to hear the time. The complication dated back to the seventeenth century, when man lived by candlelight. Watchmakers produced tiny hammers that struck small bells to mimic a church carillon, converting the beats of time into music within an accuracy of sixty seconds. At the push of a slide button on the edge of the case, mechanical sensors measured the time based on the position of the gears that drove the hands and then, in succession, chimed on the hour, the quarter-hour, and the minute—all in a different tone to designate each interval of time.
The core of Ward’s collection came from Europe, and the best pieces from Switzerland. Paul Moore, secretary of the Horological Institute of America, called these “matters of selection.” From the Ancienne Maison of Auguste Agassiz, the Swiss family firm established in St. Imier in 1832 and the forebears of the watchmaker Longines, Ward commissioned an eighteen-carat gold pocket watch with an enamel dial and Roman numerals. The sophisticated instrument featured an eight-day up-and-down power reserve indicator. Originally called a réserve de marche, this complication was designed to show the amount of remaining stored energy by indicating the tension on the mainspring at any given moment. When fully wound, the steel hand pointed to the 8, descending as the power wound down each day.
Shortly after the turn of the century, a new kind of timekeeper, the wristwatch, slowly made its way into the affections of fashionable gentlemen. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, the wristwatch’s precursor was primarily worn by ladies, usually on a neck chain or as a pendant, before becoming a bracelet. Men had initially rebuffed such timepieces as the “mark of sissies.” In 1904 the Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont asked Louis Cartier to design a watch that left his hands free as he piloted his “flying machines,” and the perception of men’s wristwatches began to shift. In 1911 the Parisian jeweler began selling its Santos model wristwatch to the public. But it was the Great War that really changed the fashion, after soldiers’ “trench watches”—bulky pocket watches affixed to straps—provided hands-free ease of function during combat. Off the battlefield, they were quickly renamed “officer’s wristwatches” and gradually became symbols of masculinity, particularly after other pilots, equestrians, sportsmen, and automobile enthusiasts found them appealing.
In 1918, three years after Patek Philippe began offering its first leather-strap “officer’s watch,” Ward acquired what appears to have been his first wristwatch, an engine-turned (guilloché) cushion-cut Patek Philippe, made of eighteen-carat gold with iridium hands, an enamel dial, and a sixty-second sub-dial. On the back he had the cartouche inscribed, Fabriqué pour James Ward Packard, Warren, Ohio, 1918, par Patek, Philippe & Cie, Genève.
Ward viewed the wristwatch as a novelty. Even as the pocket watch waned in popularity, his affections remained tethered to those timepieces that, within ten years, would be called old-fashioned “turnips.”
During his early collecting days, Ward had commissioned select pieces from Vacheron Constantin, working through Edmond E. Robert at Maiden Lane. He now dealt almost exclusively through Armitage in acquiring his timepieces, all designed as homages to art and science. A beautiful Vacheron pocket watch unusually forged in twenty-carat gold with a delicate floral bas-relief case, no. 233573, had a pair of dials engraved with the image of a house in a lush garden, one in fourteen-carat gold and the second made of enamel. Ordered in 1917 and finished a year later, the watch had a subsidiary dial indicating the seconds and was delivered to Armitage for Ward on March 11, 1919. Ward acquired another in 1918, for his wife Elizabeth, a silver, square-shaped pocket watch with an elaborately engraved case embedded with a round enamel dial and its sub-dial for seconds. On the back was a scene in bas-relief of winged archers on horseback. (Ward had also gifted his wife a Patek Philippe pendant watch made of platinum and enamel and encrusted in diamonds.) Earlier Ward had acquired a Vacheron Constantin pocket watch, received in 1912; it was a beautiful although relatively utilitarian piece of eighteen-carat gold, an enamel dial with Arabic numerals, and a sixty-second sub-dial.
Ward acquired his rare twenty-carat gold Vacheron Constantin pocket watch chronometer with trip repeater, grande and petite sonnerie, and half-quarter repeater in 1919. The monogrammed case matched the automaker’s personal stationery. Photographs by Stacy Perman.
Ward’s fourth piece made by Vacheron Constantin, a chronograph made of twenty-carat gold, with the movement no. 375551, measured both elapsed and conventional time. It was the most finely complex watch that the engineer had requested of the watchmaker. Acquired in 1919, it was also one of the most singular examples that Vacheron Constantin would craft in its own history. Among the chronograph’s complications were a trip repeater, grande and petite sonnerie, and, most unusually, a half-quarter repeater that struck at seven and a half minutes as well as on the hour and quarter-hour, all in different tones. It was unusual and rare. No other Vacheron chronograph with a half-repeater was known to have been made before it or since, a particularly precise timekeeper for a particularly exacting man.
Although Ward maintained his affair with Vacheron Constantin, his affections toward Patek Philippe never wavered, particularly when it came to constructing his most complicated pieces. At times, he communicated his desires directly to Geneva without Armitage brokering the transaction. Each piece, produced to his requirements, was built after he approved blueprints and designs, down to the color of the dial, the type of hands, and almost always the engraving of his name on the cuvette or movement itself.
In 1918, a year in which Ward hotly pursued a great number of complicated pocket watches from Patek Philippe, he made an exclusive order for a silver and gold open-face watch with a dual time zone on a subsidiary dial and oversized luminous numerals, with the movement no. 190757. It also indicated mean time, set to the international clock in Greenwich, England, which reflected world time on a twenty-four-hour scale—an interesting choice for a man who had reduced his world to Warren, Ohio, and Lakewood, New York, with a few side trips in between. The same year, he received another eighteen-carat gold Patek Philippe pocket watch, movement no. 174907, with a gold dial, an up-and-down reserve indicator, contained in an exceptional Murat-style case.
Curiously, Ward could sometimes seem detached about his collection. No matter how much he may have paid for a watch, he never considered it a rare treasure but wore it regularly. And yet once his watches were manufactured and in his possession, he was already thinking about his next commission. A great number of his watches sat in their fitted boxes untouched and idle for years. Even so, his interest in watches went beyond their engineering. He also made sure to embed in them a part of his soul.
In 1920 Ward received a highly unusual, open-face, eighteen-carat gold minute repeater with grande and petite sonnerie and an up-and-down indicator, given the movement no. 174876. Fascinated with the sea, a boating enthusiast and inventor of naval motors, he had tasked Patek Philippe to craft for him a pocket watch with a ship’s bell striking. This ancient nautical timekeeping instrument had never previously been miniaturized to fit inside a pocket watch.
In the days before such a striking was included in instruments for ships’ rather large clocks, a sailor on watch would strike a bell after a sandglass emptied into its bottom chamber during six shifts divided into six hours each. Ward’s watch was built with tiny gongs that followed the bell system of a ship’s clock that struck on each half-hour up to eight bells; for instance, sounding six strokes on a single gong at 6:15 followed by one ting-tang double strike. At 6:30 the watch struck on a single gong followed by two ting-tang double notes. At 6:45 it sounded six strokes on a single striking followed by three ting-tang double notes. Levers on the dial allowed Ward to silence one or all of the double notes of the petite sonnerie on the quarter-hour, the gong of the grande sonnerie on the hour, or the ship’s striking. It was a particularly difficult undertaking for the watchmaker. Of the watch’s thirty-seven jewels, the small donut-shaped rubies placed into pivot points to reduce friction within the movement, twenty-one were for timekeeping functions and sixteen were used for the striking sections.
As Ward challenged Patek Philippe with one ingenious complication after another, Henry Graves, Jr., stepped up his game and entered the realm of grandes complications. During Ward’s most prolific period of commissions, between 1912 and 1918, Henry purchased at least five pocket watches from Tiffany & Co. Certainly Henry had the money and the drive to go toe-to-toe with the automobile magnate over complicated pieces, but on his own he didn’t have the kind of technical and creative gifts that Ward possessed to push Patek Philippe or any watchmaker to produce artistically inspired timepieces. He could only chase a step behind the imaginative genius.
• • •
In the middle of 1919 Henry sauntered confidently through the doors of Tiffany & Co. directly under the great clock held aloft on the giant shoulders of Atlas. He was expected and recognized. Tiffany maintained an interest in Henry, along with the rest of society’s elite who passed through the store’s Corinthian columns, weighted down in ropes of jeweled baubles. It was said that Charles Tiffany himself had initially employed a small staff dedicated solely to keeping exhaustive files on its wealthy clientele, filling the pages with details regarding their financial status, newspaper stories, and photographs. When these well-heeled patrons arrived, they were identified immediately, addressed by name, and permitted to take away their distinctive boxes in robin’s-egg blue first and pay later.
The Graves family file stretched back to Henry Graves, Sr. In 1886 the jeweler had reserved a leather impression of Henry Sr.’s name with detailed flourishes for embossing his briefcases and bookbindings (at the time, a practice considered quite a special request). The jeweler had long become accustomed to Henry Jr.’s frequent visits and now acted as the middle man between him and Geneva, providing blueprints and delivering pricing, scheduling, and finally the finished product. As with Ward’s pieces, these watches took years to finish. Usually Tiffany handled the details of the engravings, sending the pieces to Geneva to be stamped with the Graves coat of arms and motto.
A trip to Tiffany to buy a watch had become something of a pastime with the Graves family. A year earlier, Henry’s son Duncan had purchased a pocket watch of his own at the jeweler’s, and his eldest son, Harry, acquired four watches, at least one of which he gifted to his soon-to-be fiancée.
Something of a ne’er-do-well, Harry had left Princeton University after spending an unremarkable semester largely inside the local cinema. He returned home to Irvington and to Margaret Dickson, the dark-haired beauty he had become smitten with while summering with his family in the Adirondacks. The New Jersey debutante daughter of Joseph and Mary Dickson was a superb match for Harry, as the affluent Dicksons had major interests in the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company.
On April 18, 1918, with the drums of war in the air, Harry somewhat impetuously ended his life of unblinking privilege and signed up for Britain’s Royal Air Force. America had yet to officially declare war on Germany, and Harry, apparently rebelling against the dull respectability of his life, jumped into the fray, joining up with the RAF in Canada. Just before leaving for training in Toronto, however, he married Margaret, on July 6, 1918. The pair wed in a lavish ceremony at Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel ballroom, which was decorated in peonies and palms. Harry was twenty-one and his bride nineteen. They gave each other Patek Philippe watches from Tiffany inscribed with their initials. Harry’s watch was also inscribed, Royal Air Force’s England MDG to HG.
Before Harry had left his Canadian barracks, however, the Great War ended on November 11, 1918. He and his new bride honeymooned in Palm Beach and then settled into an apartment at the St. Regis Hotel. Harry assumed a position at the New York Trust Company, which would soon merge with Liberty National Bank, where his father had held a board seat and the family a sizable tranche of stock. As the couple’s second wedding anniversary approached, Henry laid out $80,000 (about $921,516 today) for a colonial mansion for them spread across two acres in Ardsley-on-Hudson. Like their parents, the newlyweds easily slipped into the high life of their social set, with servants and nannies taking care of their houses and children. Their daughter Mary Dickson was born barely nine months after their wedding, and within two years she was joined by Florence Barbara and then Henry Dickson.
Henry Graves 3rd. Courtesy of Cheryl Graves.
• • •
Despite his gentle carriage, Henry had a powerful ability to translate his desires into possessions. With the receipt of a spectacular pocket watch, James Ward Packard had unknowingly placed Henry into the position of having to reassess what exactly he was made of.
It was during this period that Henry commissioned the first of his grandes complications, an open-face eighteen-carat gold pocket watch with minute-repeating grande and petite sonnerie with split-second chronograph, thirty-minute register, perpetual calendar, and ages and phases of the moon. In all, it had twelve complications. He would not receive the timekeeper for six years.
In many respects the year 1919 marked the shot across the bow. Over the next ten years, both Henry and Ward would order a majority of their pocket watches from Patek Philippe with ever more combinations of complications. In their passion for collecting, it appeared that both men felt each other’s gravitational pull. And Patek Philippe shrewdly rode the orbits of two of its most important patrons in America, if not the world. The firm dedicated its top watchmaking resources to developing the finest watches for them.
Before the Great War a locomotive of art, literature, food, fashion, science, and philosophy had roared out of Europe’s academies, cafés, palaces, and streets. After the war Europe’s streets were scarred, its cafés empty, its palaces charred, its houses turned to rubble, and its citizens deeply wounded. The once great Continent had cratered, its economies as blasted as its cities and countrysides. More than an ocean separated the once dominant Europe and the now ascendant America.
From Patek Philippe’s workshops on the Grand Quai in Geneva, the collectors’ quest appeared to be an example of hubris in an exuberant new era of American world influence. For the watchmaker, Graves and Packard soon represented a new kind of prized patron in a history populated with kings and queens, statesmen and the celebrated, who would come to include Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Einstein, and Curie. Henry Graves, Jr., and James Ward Packard changed the game. These gentlemen rivals had bottomless resources, they knew without hesitation what they wanted, and they were out to win. And they came to desire the same thing: to own the grandest of the grandes complications.
In many respects, the contest to build the most complicated watch in the history of mankind was no different from the race to circumnavigate the globe, to scrape the sky with the world’s tallest building, or to discover the vast riches of the Egyptian pharaohs buried under the ancient sands of the Valley of the Kings. All such undertakings required determination and a touch of obsession. A grande complication also required a small army of brilliant and skilled artisans, technicians, and watchmakers. The competition between the two men began like most pursuits of this sort: with an innate desire to be first, to be bigger and better, to go where nobody else had gone before—to bend history to their own terms.
Since the beginning of timekeeping, the most important and complicated watches were the result of one contest or another. Indeed the men were following the tradition of kings stretching back five centuries.