¹ Soon after the sale, Bond was unable to come up with the funds to pay for the painting and it had to be resold. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles purchased the Van Gogh for an undisclosed price in 1990.

² Around 1780, the British clockmaker George Margetts is known to have crafted an astronomical watch with a type of celestial chart.

³ Gould and Boniface divorced in 1906, after he plowed through $10 million of his wife’s money. In 1908 Boniface sought an annulment from the Vatican. Granted in 1924, it was overturned the following year, after Anna Gould appealed the decision.

⁴ Shadowbrook’s rotunda would go on to witness further episodes of history. In 1926 the composer and lyricist Irving Berlin, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants, arrived at the mansion with his new bride, the Roman Catholic heiress Ellin Mackay, with whom he had just eloped, to visit her mother and stepfather. Mackay was the daughter of Clarence Mackay, head of the American Posts and Telegraph Company and a known snob and anti-Semite, and the marriage left the two estranged. During the newlyweds’ visit, Berlin presented a wedding gift to his wife: the sheet music to Always, assigning the copyright and all royalties of the song to her. Within fifty years, the song earned Mrs. Berlin some $1 million, and later daughter and father were said to have reconciled.

Forty years later, in 1966, the great tenor saxophone player Stan Getz and his wife, Monica, purchased Shadowbrook. The acoustics in the rotunda (and the showers) sold Getz on the house. “They’re fantastic, they’re the only place I feel inspired to sing,” he said. “One of the best gifts I ever gave myself was this room.”

⁵ In 2004 Eagle Island Camp was listed on the National Historic Register.

⁶ Disgruntled with the changes at Packard, in 1905 George Weiss broke all ties to the company and exchanged his three hundred Packard shares for twelve Model L’s, which he later sold from his Cleveland home.

⁷ Following Salomons’s death in 1925, his family divided the collection among his wife and children. Christie’s sold nearly seventy pieces in three sales between 1964 and 1965. Another fifty-seven, including the Marie-Antoinette, were donated to the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, founded by Salomons’s daughter Vera. It is there that the tragic queen took another fateful turn. A career criminal named Na’aman Lidor (née Diller) broke into the museum on April 15, 1983, and stole it, along with nearly one hundred other clocks and watches worth hundreds of millions of dollars, leaving behind no clues other than a half-eaten ham sandwich, empty Coca-Cola bottles, cables, wires, and a dirty mattress. Lidor was no common thief but a man obsessed with Breguet. He never attempted to sell the watches; rather he took them apart and stashed them in safety deposit boxes across Europe with detailed instructions on how to put them back together again. His odd scheme came to light only in 2008, four years after he died. A lawyer contacted a Tel Aviv antiques dealer on behalf of an anonymous client who said she had inherited the watches. In turn, the dealer called the museum. The client was Lidor’s wife, and the crime unraveled as Lidor had confessed to her all his crimes before his death and suggested she sell the watches. The Marie-Antoinette, along with forty-two other stolen pieces, were secretly returned to the museum.

⁸ The Hewitts earned great acclaim as breeders, and their shepherds took Best in Show at the world’s most important dog shows. In 1929 their Utz von Haus Schutting won the Grand Championship of his breed at the German Shepherd Dog Association in Berlin. Some two hundred pedigreed German shepherds would trace their lineage to Utz von Haus Schutting.

⁹ In 1928 the Clinic’s Otto Glasser, Valentine Seitz, and U. V. Portmann developed the first condenser dosimeter that accurately measured x-rays and radiation. This device was so highly regarded that the U.S. military later used it to test nuclear weapons.

¹⁰ Patek Philippe eventually sold the Place Cornavin factory, which was later converted into a hotel.

¹¹ In 2004 the media mogul Rupert Murdoch purchased the triplex penthouse for $44 million, at the time the largest amount ever paid for a New York City apartment.

¹² In 2007 Antiquorum’s board ousted Patrizzi, accusing him of misappropriation of funds, among other things, allegations he denied. The same year the Wall Street Journal aired allegations that Patrizzi intervened with watchmakers to pump up prices at auction, with the manufacturers themselves feverishly bidding on pieces. Again Patrizzi denied the charges.

¹³ In 1998 Christie’s sold a trio of James Ward Packard’s early pocket watch acquisitions, two open-face key-wound verge watches and a pivoted detent chronometer (Chevalier, Piguet, and French), for $1,495.

¹⁴ In 1998 Marilyn Graves donated an oak long-case clock made by Thomas Tompion circa 1675–78 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The clock, veneered with oystershellcut olivewood and marquetry panels of stained bone, ivory, and gilt brass mounts, was very likely one of her grandfather’s handed down to her after her father died.

¹⁵ All of the prices quoted from the June 14, 2012, auction include the hammer price and the buyer’s premium.