The Final Windup
In the fall of 1925, a sense of urgency took hold of Ward. His doctors had discovered a tumor. Although surgeons soon removed the malignancy, initially giving him a positive prognosis, the specter of his mortality had revealed itself. Scarcely two years earlier, on November 11, 1923, his brother, Will, had finally succumbed to his chronic litany of health woes, including paralysis and blindness, and died at his home on North Mahoning Avenue. The engineer, now sixty-two, made certain to put his affairs in order.
At the top of his list, after taking care of his wife, Elizabeth, were plans for the dispersal of his watches. While few would accuse Ward of vanity, he recognized the important legacy that his remarkable assemblage represented. In drawing up his will on November 12, 1925, he made the decision to preserve the core of the collection built up over decades, bequeathing his most complicated and important timepieces to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Ward was never ostentatious about his timepieces. For him the joy was in the challenge, to push horology beyond its current boundaries. He and Elizabeth had remained childless (he did make ample provisions for his brother’s son, Warren Packard, with whom he remained quite close), and it seemed only logical for a man so devoted to the public’s understanding of technology and art to offer his watches to the kind of forum that would allow the greatest number of people to appreciate them. When the Cleveland Museum opened its doors nine years earlier on the edge of Wade Park, it had declared its mission: “For the benefit of all people, forever.”
Keeping his watches intact was an unusual step. Throughout the ages few historically significant collections had survived more than a generation unbroken; most were carved up among descendants and passed quietly among dealers and collectors, eventually making their way under the hammer. Even the great Breguets that Sir David Salomons had assembled so lovingly were eventually dispersed. To ensure that his watches remained together, Ward generously stipulated the sum of $2,000 (about $26,000 today) to “provide for the proper housing and care of such a collection.”
Ward’s decision had broad implications. For starters, he didn’t explicitly list the number of watches he wished to bestow on the Museum. At the time he signed his last will and testament, he had commissioned several new pieces, with a number already in the process of manufacture for delivery upon their completion, including his astronomical watch, the Packard. Within the next two years, he would receive at least a handful more, among which were some of the most important and inventive of his entire oeuvre.
For a collection already brimming with incomparable mechanical specimens, Ward reached higher still. With his favorite complication, the chiming mechanism, he had arrived at a rather sentimental desire. In addition to a minute repeater, he commissioned Patek Philippe, possibly after he drew up his will, to create a musical alarm that would play the lullaby from the Benjamin Godard opera Jocelyn, a favorite of his mother’s. The watchmaker had long become accustomed to the automaker’s requests for specific functions, but this latest one posed an exceedingly difficult technical dilemma. At the time, an alarm watch was a rarity, and one playing a melodic alarm almost unheard of. In addition, this particular lullaby was quite long, and Ward insisted that it be played in its entirety.
Ordinarily, creating such a mechanism would have necessitated a thick pin barrel that required an even larger watch. Patek Philippe struck upon an inspired solution, which borrowed a technique used by nineteenth-century Swiss music box makers. As the barrel turned, with the first half tripping the steel prongs of the musical comb, the watchmakers fashioned a second set of pins (separated by less than half a millimeter) that could take over the melody when the cylinder paused halfway after completing a full rotation, creating a slight shift. By pressing down on the gold pushpin on the dial’s edge, a series of wheels were activated that turned the alarm hand in the small center sub-dial, releasing the beautiful “berceuse” that his mother had played for him as a boy.
Despite his illness, or in spite of it, as Ward watched his last minutes and hours of life slip by, he continued to commission superb instruments to chronicle the passage of time.
And it was the passage of time that led Henry Graves, Jr., back into the game, or at least revived his competitive spirit.
• • •
On June 5, 1926, before the Graves family left for the season at Eagle Island, Henry had the happiness of escorting his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Gwendolen, down the aisle at St. Thomas’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Thirty years earlier he had married Florence in this very church. Clutching a bouquet of white orchids and lilies of the valley, Gwendolen wore a gown of white satin and a veil of rose-point lace covered with seed pearls, which her mother had worn on her wedding day, to which she fastened orange blossoms.
Since the couple’s engagement four months earlier, the society columns churned out a reliable stream of copy concerning the union between the wealthy financier’s only daughter and Reginald Humphrey Fullerton, a thirty-six-year-old Bankers Trust vice president, reporting every detail, from the couple’s prewedding luncheon at Pierre’s to the final lineup of Gwendolen’s ten bridesmaids. The New York Times printed a large engagement portrait of the bride-to-be staring coolly at the camera, draped in pearls. Following a grand reception at the Park Lane Hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton embarked on a six-month European honeymoon.
Reginald Humphrey Fullerton and Gwendolen Graves Fullerton at the time of their wedding in 1926. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 2012.
Not long after the newlyweds returned to New York, Henry gifted his daughter a twelve-room duplex encompassing the seventh and eighth floors in the new, lavishly appointed building at 1030 Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The thirteen-story neo-Italianate building contained yet more luxury apartments to stake their claim over the prime stretch of real estate from which Old New York’s graceful mansions had long stood guard over society. Henry had purchased the apartment from L. Gordon Hamersley, the tobacco heir and President’s Cup yachtsman. Two years earlier Hamersley had demolished his family’s five-story French Renaissance mansion that had occupied the spot since 1899 and built the luxury co-op, taking up residence in its twenty-three-room penthouse.
In the lingering shadow of sadness that followed Harry’s death, Henry and Florence immersed themselves in the familiar rhythms of public life. Henry kept up his calendar of social engagements. Florence resumed her charity work, organizing a benefit for St. Faith’s House, an Episcopalian home for unwed mothers, among other good works. They followed the rituals of society, attending their country clubs and the opera. They moved with the seasons: summer on the water at Eagle Island, the fall on the horse trails at the Homestead in Virginia, winter at the Park Avenue apartment.
In February 1925 Harry’s widow, Margaret, married a man Henry viewed as a gold digger after her considerable assets, Dexter Wright Hewitt, a thirty-five-year-old widower who worked in advertising and had two children. None of Henry’s criticisms of Hewitt’s intentions or character concerned his former daughter-in-law, who moved her new husband into the Ardsley mansion, the one she had shared with Harry, and resumed her old life without missing a beat. Margaret and Dexter golfed, danced at dinner parties, and spent the season in Palm Beach. In Ardsley they raised champion German shepherds at Mardex Kennels, which Margaret established after her husband died.8
For Henry, Irvington had become unbearable. Not long after his son’s death, he and Florence left the Millionaire’s Colony for New York and did not return. In May, just three months after Margaret wed Hewitt, Henry sold Shadowbrook to Dr. Joseph A. Blake, a noted surgeon. Henry severed his relationship with Margaret and cut off his grandchildren from their share of the trust set up by his father in 1906. In time, both Henry and Margaret would come to regret their decisions, but for entirely different reasons.
Gwendolen’s marriage was a welcome tonic. Henry had a special affection for her and was extremely fond of Reginald Fullerton, a Yale graduate who traced his lineage to the American Revolution. His father, William Dixon Fullerton, an Ohioan whose birth was noted in Americans of Gentle Birth and Their Ancestors, had listed his profession as simply “capitalist.” Gwendolen and Reginald would have two children, Reginald “Pete” Humphrey, Jr., and Nan Trimble.
As a token of the fondness and warmth he felt for his new son-in-law, on the day of their nuptials Henry presented Reginald with a Patek Philippe pocket watch. Engraved with the Fullerton coat of arms and the Latin motto Lux in Tenebris (Light in Darkness), the eighteen-carat gold trip minute repeater offered Reginald a rather intimate link to his new father-in-law’s most private and exclusive world.
Three years earlier, on June 26, 1923, Gwendolen’s brother Duncan had married Helen Johnson, a pretty society girl who made her debut at the Colony Club, Manhattan’s most prestigious private women’s social club. After a honeymoon spent briefly at Eagle Island before cutting across eighteen countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, the couple moved into an apartment at the exclusive Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street. The Ambassador billed itself as “New York’s Most Aristocratic Hotel,” with a five-room apartment renting for upward of $30,000 (about $390,000 today) a year. As the New York Tribune reported, its residents paid “some of the highest [rents] demanded by any hotel in the country.” In due course, Helen and Duncan held sway over their own Park Avenue duplex and a country mansion, first on Long Island and then in Connecticut, with their four children: Henry, Duncan Jr., and twin girls, Marilyn Preston and Helen Mitchell.
Only the Graveses’ youngest, George Coe, a dashing adventurer with movie star good looks, who was finishing his studies at Yale, had yet to take a bride. George Coe had long demonstrated his preference for hunting caribou in Alaska, surveying the South African bush, and chasing adventure in his seaplane to the social chase.
On May 7, 1926, just weeks before Gwendolen’s nuptials, Henry’s long-awaited package arrived from Tiffany’s. It held the Patek Philippe pocket watch that he had commissioned seven years earlier. A singular piece of timekeeping, the eighteen-carat gold open-face watch with an enamel dial, Roman numerals, and blue-steel moon-style hands signaled Henry’s determination to place his name on history’s most exclusive horological lists. The beautiful watch featured twelve complications, including two-train minute repeating, grande and petite sonnerie, a perpetual calendar, split-second chronograph, and ages and phases of the moon. The gold cuvette, engraved per Henry’s instruction, read, No. 174961 Made For Henry Graves Jr. New York 1926 by Patek Philippe & Co. Geneva, Switzerland. He paid the monumental sum of $2,650.50 for the piece (equal to $34,498 today).
Not only did this particular watch elevate Henry into the realm of storied grandes complications—James Ward Packard territory—but it marked his return to the game. One of horology’s most voracious consumers was back on the hunt. Indeed between the fall of 1925 and the spring of 1927, Henry acquired at least thirty-eight watches, the majority purchased through Tiffany & Co. During this period of prodigious acquisitiveness, his commissions displayed his intense desire to own prizewinning grandes complications for which he paid handsomely. One exceptional pocket watch, with the movement no. 197506, cost the financier $3,875.50 ($51,312 today).
Henry’s Patek Philippe watches were exquisite examples of his sophistication as a collector of complicated timepieces. As he chased down Ward’s venerable expertise, his main point of distinction was that nearly all of his commissions displayed his intense obsession with proof of world-class merit: a Bulletin de Première Classe de l’Observatoire Astronomique de Genève. One, with the movement no. 198050-1913, was an exceptional piece of engineering and featured a thirty-two-hour power reserve, up-and-down indicator, and a platinum dial. Its movement had won first prize at the Geneva Observatory timing contests in 1925–1926. The movement of his eighteen-carat gold pocket chronometer, with blue steel hands and subsidiary seconds dial, no. 170358, had captured a first prize for “best average running” at Geneva in 1925. Henry commissioned a third Patek Philippe, an eighteen-carat gold open-face keyless winding watch, with the movement no. 198052, incorporating a minute repeater on three gongs, grande and petite sonnerie, perpetual retrograde calendar with phases and ages of the moon, and power reserve indications; in all, there were eleven complications. In the quiet whiplash of commissions that marked this gentlemen’s contest, the men often went head-to-head, as this particular piece was quite similar to another grande complication, an eighteen-carat gold, open-face pocket watch that featured a perpetual calendar, moon phases, grande and petite sonnerie, minute repeating the Westminster chime on four gongs, and up-and-down indications (no. 174749), first delivered to James Ward Packard.
In 1925, about five years after Ward received his rare Patek Philippe ship’s bell pocket watch (no. 174876) with the eighteen-carat gold dial, the maison delivered a near identical piece to Henry. His no. 198061 contained an open-face enamel dial minute repeater, grande sonnerie, and two up-and-down indicators, one for the winding train and one for the striking train. Engraved with the family crest, Henry’s eighteen-carat gold pocket watch triumphed over the automaker’s, as Ward’s timepiece featured but a single up-and-down indicator.
• • •
Neither of these two men could have known what they started when they challenged Patek Philippe to craft the world’s most complicated timepieces. Henry and Ward dictated the terms of their timekeeping arms race, a contest that would end only when one conceded defeat, withdrew, died, or simply tired of the game. Even then, some other contender could be out in the horological universe. This gentlemen’s contest did not play out publicly. The watchmakers, bound by discretion, walked a tightrope of delicate diplomacy. Outside of the World’s Fairs, Patek Philippe kept its technological achievements close, protecting them almost as zealously as they guarded their patrons. Yet rumors were rife, and news of an incredibly inventive feature continuously burnished the maison’s reputation among collectors and horological aficionados, as did word of a marquee client professing fealty to the firm. After all, when Queen Victoria purchased a pair of lovely watches for herself and Prince Albert at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, Europe’s crown heads soon beat a path to Patek Philippe. A collector’s greatest weakness was his or her extraordinary will to possess, which was the watchmaker’s most tantalizing weapon.
Henry could be certain that, of all the wondrous ticking universes that Patek Philippe had created, none could claim to be the most complicated watch ever made. His gold pocket watch with twelve complications, while unique and significant, had four fewer complications than Ward’s magnificent grande complication. Perhaps he recognized that in terms of mechanical intellect and creative technology he would always have to concede to the engineering genius of Ward. But Henry, a practiced connoisseur, was not one to hold a candle to anybody else’s flame.
Already as he walked Gwendolen down the aisle at St. Thomas’s and even as he received delivery of his grande complication Henry had leaped to his next decisive move. In 1925, as Ward laid out plans for his watches following his death, Henry made the decision that would alter the balance between the exclusive circle of collectors throughout history, finishing the game of one-upmanship.
Henry approached Patek Philippe apparently through Tiffany’s for a meeting to be held in “strictest secrecy.” Not particularly comfortable practicing the art of small talk, he had one epic request and got to the point abruptly. He desired another grande complication, although not just another complex timekeeper. His marching orders were simple: he wanted “the most complicated watch,” one that was “impossibly elaborate” and contained “the maximum possible number of complications.” Putting a fine point on his very explicit instructions, he added, “And, in any case, certainly more complicated than that of Mr. Packard!”
With that, Henry put into motion a nearly eight-year odyssey that sent Patek Philippe’s craftsmen, horologists, scientists, jewelers, artists, and engineers to their sunlit ateliers to create what would become known as the Graves Supercomplication. According to Patek Philippe, Henry’s request “had not been heard in the watchmaking industry for a generation.”
Over the next three years, the watchmaker undertook in-depth studies in astronomy, applied mathematics, and precision mechanisms. The mechanicians drew up a list of specifications of existing functions and those not yet tested, categorizing all possible functions. In some ways Patek Philippe was competing with itself, just as it was contending with the glory of the past. The magnificent timepieces it had crafted for James Ward Packard and other luminaries gave it a measure of experience—but only to a degree, for the firm set out to push past all that had been created before that time.
Gradually the design took shape: an open-face pocket watch, requiring two main dials to contain the various displays in an unadorned eighteen-carat gold case. There would be twenty-four complications in all, to include a full Westminster carillon on five gongs with a grande and petite sonnerie in passing, a minute repeater, and an alarm. This number alone would make it the most complicated watch ever crafted. The watch also contained two power reserve indicators for the movement and chime. Several of the complications, such as sidereal time, the equation of time as indicated by a sundial and mean time (the average of solar time), were hardly necessary to understand the passage of hours in the twentieth century. This pursuit of obscure complications not even remotely essential to the movement typified Henry’s determined connoisseurship. In spectacular fashion, just as the Packard watch had, the Graves watch would feature a celestial chart representing the night sky over Henry’s beloved New York City. In its storied history, this was only Patek Philippe’s second attempt to produce such a magnificent sky map (the Packard was its first). The Graves Supercomplication enabled Patek Philippe to demonstrate its watchmaking genius in a single instrument.
Remarkably, given the five centuries that preceded this undertaking, outside of patent designs, the construction of complicated movements had never been enshrined in a manual. Traditionally, watchmakers worked from memory, passing on their craft and wisdom to their apprentices. The small horological army involved in the Supercomplication marshaled their encyclopedic knowledge, having built complicated timepieces over eight decades. During the course of five years, Patek’s master watchmakers engaged in the meticulous continuous process of trial and error until the mechanism took shape, producing ratchet wheels, pinions, bridges, barrels, balance springs, jewels, and discs. As always, pieces were hand-finished to minimize friction and increase their precision and longevity. They worked out the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of building one layer on top of another, with layers of complications composed of microscopic parts.
Patek Philippe assembled the finest watchmakers in Switzerland to produce the Graves Supercomplication, nearly all members of the country’s most important horological families. The endeavor recalled a time when Europe’s kings called to their court expert scientists and specialists to craft instruments that defined an era. Le Fils de Victorin Piguet in Le Sentier, founded in the late nineteenth century, specializing in the production of complicated watches, blank movements, and dial trains, headed up a great deal of the craftsmanship and manufacture. Michel Piguet of Le Brassus designed the grande sonnerie mechanism, and Henri Daniel Piguet built the hand-setting mechanism. The case, built with a depth to accommodate the highly complex movement, was the work of Luc Rochat of L’Abbeye.
Jean Piguet, chief technician on the project, was kept awake at night attempting to solve the extreme difficulty posed by the setting mechanism. Three pairs of hands—for mean time, sidereal time, and the alarm—all shared the same winding-crown. When, during one of these sleepless nights, Piguet hit upon the solution, he jumped from his bed and immediately wrote it down, terrified that he might forget the answer by morning. His solution: a double winding method—pushing the crown forward wound up the striking method, and turning it backward wound up the watch. Pushing on the left of the pendant set the alarm. Pulling the crown out set the mean and sidereal time functions.
Once the watch had taken shape on paper and the drawings had been checked and rechecked, Patek Philippe sent sketches to Henry for his final endorsement. Detailed designs, two sheaves of paper showing the two dials, a side view, and the engraving above the sky chart, were returned with the signature Design Approved Henry Graves Jr.
Yet neither Henry nor Ward knew that, as they stayed in the game, time itself had become an even more powerful player in their drama.