A Gentleman’s War
Perched regally on the Grand Quai, Patek Philippe’s workshops overlook Lake Geneva with a spectacular view facing north. Decades of acclaim and prosperity had brought the watchmaker to the left bank of the Rhône, where it had erected an elegant, four-story building for its workshops, offices, and salons. The building, completed in 1890 (with a fifth story added in 1907), was, for the period, state of the art. Thirty-horsepower turbines in the basement furnished electricity to the entire building, supplying power for the tools and machinery on the second and third floor’s engineering rooms, as well as to the fourth floor, where the escapement components were produced.
By the time James Ward Packard and Henry Graves, Jr., enlisted Patek Philippe in their collecting joust, its founders had died (Patek in 1877 and Philippe in 1894), and management of the celebrated firm had passed to Joseph Bénassy-Philippe, Philippe’s son-in-law. Joseph Philippe, the youngest of Jean-Adrien’s five children, became head watchmaker. In 1901 the company reorganized as a joint stock company with 1.6 million Swiss francs under the new name Ancienne Manufacture d’Horlogerie Patek Philippe et Cie S.A. But with its major stockholder, Joseph Philippe, named director of the board, the company signaled its intention to remain rooted in the founders’ philosophy and stay a family firm as well. In 1913, six years after Joseph died, his son Adrien took over as director. Having established its reputation in the nineteenth century, the watchmaker focused on perfecting its celebrated craftsmanship while increasing its manufacture of complicated movements in the twentieth.
Europe had slid from its perch as the great global power since before World War I, and America had stepped into the breach. Europe’s luxury watchmakers increasingly turned to America’s wealthy industrialists and financiers, with their aristocratic tastes for patronage. America’s flush watch collectors, Patek Philippe noted, offered its watchmakers “the opportunity to apply the skills and techniques developed over the previous generation.”
The Patek Philippe salon and workshops, facing the Rue du Rhône in Geneva, have changed little since 1907. Photograph by Stacy Perman.
In America, Patek Philippe developed a strong network of exclusive retailers, from Tiffany & Co. in New York to Shreve & Co. in San Francisco. In Geneva, the watchmaker would usher its affluent American patrons into one of its opulent ground-floor salons, the largest of them decorated with black and gilt wood, rich Cordovan leather, and elegant bronze statuary. A large oval that framed many of the maison’s numerous Observatory and other important medals from over the years was prominently displayed in the salon. The genteel sales staff maintained its American Register in maroon leather, listing in florid ink the names of visiting clients.
On occasion, James Ward Packard corresponded directly with Geneva, but he appears to have preferred to conduct his business mainly through his personal emissary, F. E. Armitage. Although Henry Graves, Jr., had traveled to Geneva, he channeled most of his desires through Tiffany & Co. and, later, Patek Philippe’s American headquarters in New York. Watch collecting required enormous patience; approvals and communication proceeded slowly through handwritten letters. The manufacture took years, and an instrument’s delivery might take weeks, sometimes months, traveling by ship and post.
During the dozen or so years following Ward’s receipt of his 1916 grande complication with the foudroyante chronograph, both he and Henry repeatedly turned to Patek Philippe to commission fantastic timepieces with multiple horological functions. From this point on, their unspoken contest thundered ahead. “First one, then the other of these two gentlemen would order timepieces,” wrote Alan Banbery, the curator of Patek Philippe’s private collection, many years later. He described this period as “the prime, vintage years for a number of timepieces produced by the Manufactory.”
As the 1920s roared forward, the two men induced Patek Philippe to push past its own storied inventiveness and skill. They commissioned pieces with tourbillons and grande and petite sonnerie, and they combined several complications, such as perpetual calendars and phases of the moon, in novel arrangements. Every instrument was magnificent and unusual, and each became a monument to the individual gentleman’s particular bravura. In something of a chess match, each watch surpassed the previous one in some manner, necessitating that the two men return once again to Geneva to best themselves, while eliciting the best from the watchmaker.
Given his engineering brilliance, Ward had an incontestable advantage in requesting his unusual approaches be translated into ticking realities. He had commissioned a unique chronograph, movement no. 157392, with a tachometer scale capable of charting speeds up to 150 miles per hour or kilometers per hour over a measured course; the spiraled calibrations on the watch’s outer track converted the seconds to miles per hour. Ward’s minute repeater with a split-second chronograph and hour repeater, movement no. 197505, featured two center second hands that could be halted individually and directed to fly-jump the other moving hand. It was also unusual for the period, in which an hour recorder was not only rare but highly uncommon, as on this timepiece, where both the hour and the minute occupy the same auxiliary dial. Ward desired to possess the best in a category and then rewrite all known categories.
In one highly unusual request, Ward challenged the watchmaker to add a tourbillon to a minute-repeater chronometer. His request was unprecedented. While the exquisitely intricate tourbillon was reserved for the most exceptional of timepieces, Patek Philippe had never attempted to craft such a combination of complications in order to avoid intruding on the main wheel’s train adjustment, which might negatively impact the timepiece’s accuracy. In the end, the Ohio engineer prevailed. He took receipt of the timekeeper with the movement no. 174720 on November 19, 1919.
Just as he had insisted on graceful lines in Packard motorcars, Ward remained committed to the singular combinations of beauty and precision in his commissioned pieces. For another piece, he requested a richly carved case of eighteen-carat gold covered by an outer casing of chiseled repoussé in silver, showing L’Enlèvement d’Europe (The Rape of Europa). Underneath the dial ticked a minute-repeater mechanism with an exceedingly rare and sophisticated carillon grande sonnerie on three polished spiral gongs. This particular watch, movement no. 197791, was exceptionally small, at seventeen lignes, or one and a half inches, for the degree of complications it featured.
Like Ward, Henry desired only the finest materials. In general he preferred hands made of blue steel and often requested his cases be made in high-grade gold and platinum, although Henry did not share Ward’s more baroque aesthetic sense, preferring his cases polished and their designs enhanced usually with no more than his family’s coat of arms.
Restlessly, Henry awaited the delivery of his grande complication, first commissioned in 1919. In the interim, he ordered pieces stuffed with complications: tourbillon regulators, perpetual calendars, and chronometers. As Henry came into his own as a collector, he remained fixated on Observatory prizewinning watches. One, an eighteen-carat gold pocket lever chronometer, movement no. 178448, featured thirty-six hours power reserve indication. Completed in 1921, the Bulletin de Première Classe de l’Observatoire Astronomique de Genève awarded the watch first prize for the timing contest in 1919. Once drawn into the remarkable discipline of timekeeping, Henry began accumulating variations, although slight, that expressed a diversity of perfection.
During their collecting years, Ward took delivery of perhaps as many as forty Patek Philippe timepieces, while Henry acquired a number closer to eighty. However, this duel was not based on the number of watches owned but on owning the watch with the most exceptional timekeeping qualities and the greatest combination of complications.
As the decade pulsed ahead, the automaker from Warren, Ohio, and the New York financial scion emerged as haute horlogerie’s two greatest American patrons, and their watchmakers were more than delighted to assist them. Their patronage engendered special treatment. No request, it appears, was denied. In addition to one-of-a-kind pieces with special features, the pair requested exclusive serial numbers and their names engraved in specific fashion; for Henry, that usually meant on the dial, and for Ward, on the movement itself.
Patek Philippe provided Henry with sketches of his grandes complications for approval. Photographs courtesy of Patek Philippe.
As the master watchmakers sat at their benches delivering on each new challenge, the men at the front of Patek Philippe’s house went to great lengths to keep both men enthralled. In the course of four years, the firm produced twin double-barrel desk clocks. Slanted and rectangular in shape, the pair of clocks was encased in silver with gold stylized decorations of rosettes, floral ribbons, and winged creatures; they were said to be the only two such pieces that Patek ever crafted. Hinged at the bottom, the case opened to reveal a compartment that contained the winding keys and could hold small personal items. Besides keeping time, each clock featured a complex movement with a perpetual calendar, indicated phases of the moon, and had an eight-day power reserve gauge. Patek Philippe called the stunning instrument Le Presse-papiers (the Paperweight). It was just the kind of extraordinary, rare piece made especially for highly regarded clients as a reward for uncommon patronage. Ward took receipt of the first, movement no. 197707, in 1923, customized with his Art Deco monogram under the dial. Four years later, Henry took delivery of the second, movement no. 198048. His clock carried the Graves eagle surmounting a crown in gold. The dial, case, movement, and cuvette were engraved Made for Henry Graves Jr., New York.
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Patek Philippe’s sundrenched workshops emitted an uninterrupted flow of craftsmanship and innovations to match the ambitions of each commission from the Americans. Each new watch was carefully considered, each a major undertaking. As one watchmaker’s refrain went, “A mechanical watch is a living thing.” Life began on paper. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of drawings built up the initial picture of the escapement, all demonstrating a command of applied mathematics, geometry, and engineering. Every new design was a gamble and Patek Philippe’s workshops a great horological casino.
The shop ceilings featured an extensive system of pulleys, shafts, and driving belts under which the master watchmakers, draped in robes, plied their trade like surgeon-artists in a dust-free, temperature-controlled environment. Patek Philippe assiduously maintained its standing as a fabrication complète. The maison produced the majority of its own parts, watch cases, and other key elements in house, availing itself of components from the Jura Valley on those occasions when it became absolutely necessary.
The men at the bench made sheets of metal at the required thickness from which all elements were cut, hardened, tempered, filed, and turned into parts, while face-lathes and rounding tools were deployed to make the mechanisms required in each movement. At each step, every single component was washed, polished, examined, and checked once again to ensure it was delicately balanced and perfectly finished. Working with hundreds of tools packed clinically in rows of wooden drawers, the watchmakers manipulated thousands of tiny gears and bridges to shape one perfect instrument of timekeeping.
The process was painstaking and laborious. In a dictionary on the arts and sciences published in 1820, Abraham Rees asserted that a watch required no fewer than thirty-four highly trained people to manufacture, each of whom had served a lengthy apprenticeship before taking the bench. Another observer visiting Patek’s workshops in 1877 noted that at least seventy-five different artists and craftsmen touched a pocket watch before it was finished. The skilled work demanded nearly four dozen processes. The burnishing of the cases, ornamentation, and decoration required at least another fourteen, and the dial another ten. Each watch was lubricated with oil, hand-assembled, and hand-finished to minimize friction and increase precision and longevity by ensuring the smoothness of the parts, the chamfered edges, and the polished screws. Before completion, every piece was heated and frozen to test against all possible temperature and climate conditions.
Furthermore, Patek Philippe strictly adhered to the twelve technical and aesthetic conditions of the Poiçon de Genève (the Geneva Seal), the strict standard of excellence dating back to an 1886 law guaranteeing the origin (mechanical movement, assembly, and regulation in the canton of Geneva), quality of workmanship, durability, and “exceptional savoir-faire.” The firm was part of an exclusive circle of watchmakers allowed to use the seal, proudly stamped on the main plate and one of the bridges of each movement produced.
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Before Ward’s and Henry’s pursuit of timepieces integrating numerous complications, grandes complications had generally been created by a watchmaker as a model or particular triumph. Or a purchaser would invite a watchmaker to produce an instrument that reflected his highest level of skill and knowledge of the day. In 1893, for instance, Commodore Vanderbilt had gifted his son, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., an intricately engraved gold Patek Philippe minute-repeater, split-second chronograph from Tiffany for his twenty-first birthday.
Earlier, collectors had tended to belong to two camps. For one group, the watchmakers determined the design and number of complications based on their own ambition. Geneva’s watchmakers lured patrons and burnished their prestige, constructing the most lavish timepieces for the world’s most prestigious customers. Vacheron Constantin delighted King Fuad I of Egypt with grandes complications created in his honor. During his state visit to Switzerland the watchmaker presented the king with a watch of twelve complications: a split-second chronograph, grande and petite sonnerie, quarters and minutes with three-note chimes, a perpetual calendar, and moon phases. Made of eighteen-carat gold, it had eight hands and forty-six rubies.
Frequently the rich and powerful also presented those who had served them in some capacity with beautifully engraved watches, often bearing their own portraits or coat of arms. In 1963 the city of Berlin presented President John F. Kennedy with a gold Patek Philippe clock to commemorate the Geneva Conference that established the Moscow-Washington “hot line” telephone link. Decades earlier, Adolf Hitler had rewarded the meteorologist who had given him a favorable weather forecast prior to his invasion of the Low Countries and France with a gold watch engraved with his signature and the date of the invasion.
The second camp of collectors, usually immensely wealthy, took on horology as a study, bankrolling collections plucked from antiquity. Sir David Salomons, a British barrister, philanthropist, member of Parliament, scientist, and founder of the English Society of Engineers, also held the distinction of being the greatest historian and collector of Breguet watches. Much like Ward, Salomons’s deep passion for horology stemmed from his great interest in engineering. Born in 1851, he had taken out patents for electric lamps and had developed one of the first electric cooking devices. His home north of Tunbridge Wells, Broomhill, was one of the first in Britain to be lit with electricity. But it was for his watch collection that he would forever be known.
During his lifetime, Salomons assembled the largest, most varied Breguet collection in the world, some 124 examples of the watchmaker’s finest work. He wrote, “To carry a fine Breguet watch is to feel that you have the brains of a genius in your pocket.” In 1921 he published the first complete Breguet biography, noting, “My object is not to advertise my Collection . . . for I dislike advertisement.”
On May 3, 1917, while making his way home to Grosvenor Street in a downpour, Salomons happened to come upon Breguet’s chef d’oeuvre, the Marie-Antoinette, sitting in the window of a jeweler’s near Regent Street, and after careful contemplation, he purchased the remarkable piece. “Evening after evening, I studied this watch,” wrote Salomons, “which is most complex and interesting, with the result that I formed the opinion that no other maker of watches could approach such work, and I have had considerable experience of the productions of other makers.”7
In America the princes of commerce assembled collections with great historical provenance. In 1910 J. P. Morgan purchased the celebrated watch collection of the German publisher Carl Marfels, eighty seventeenth- and eighteenth-century timekeeping masterpieces (including an egg watch in Limoges enamel, considered the most expensive in the world at the time) for $360,000 (the equivalent of $8.3 million today). The coal-mining baron and former senator Clarence W. Watson amassed a collection of 314 historical watches, much like Henry Huntington collected Gainsboroughs, some dating back to the seventeenth century.
Men like Willard H. Wheeler, the son of the prominent New York jeweler Hayden Wheeler, collected timepieces in homage to human ingenuity. Over twenty years, beginning at the start of the twentieth century, Wheeler collected precisely one hundred rare antique timepieces representing the evolution of the watch, with the notable exception of the wristwatch. He maintained this number by adding new, superior pieces and removing lesser ones, including examples made by British masters such as Thomas Tompion and Thomas Mudge for their royal patrons. Among his prizes, Wheeler possessed “the Fountain,” a clock elaborately enameled and inlaid with pearls made for Kea-king, the fifth Chinese emperor of the Mantchow Dynasty, and a large coach watch that spoke the time when a string was pulled, made for British Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.
Once Wheeler had set his heart on a watch, he wouldn’t stop until he possessed it. It might take him years to persuade an owner to part with a prized watch, but he always managed to procure the pieces he fancied.
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James Ward Packard and Henry Graves, Jr., changed the game. Until these two connoisseurs made their desires known, few men had created entire custom-designed collections based on their whims and fancies, specifically for their own usage.