The Future (& History) of Time & Watchmaking

ROMA AGRAWAL

OK, so I've got a Riddle for you: “I can't be saved though people try. When fun is had they say I fly. They say I'm money. I can be spent. I can be wasted. But never lent.” Any guesses?

I'm Roma Agrawal. And you're listening to Create The Future from the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. And today we're going to expand your understanding of one of the most fundamental organising principles in all of humanity: time. My guest is Doctor Rebecca Struthers, an expert watchmaker and horologist.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Time really is measuring the events in the universe that are completely outside of our control. And yet we've created these tiny little machines that we can keep in our pocket or wear on our wrists that were almost our way of trying to get to grips with that

ROMA AGRAWAL

She runs her own specialist watchmaking business, Struthers Watchmakers, and has written a fascinating book called Hands Of Time about the history of time telling.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

It all speaks to this innate human urge we have to understand the world around us. It gives us a sense of meaning. Maybe that's just me.

ROMA AGRAWAL

In this episode, we're going to take a journey through time itself, from ancient time telling methods where we followed cues from the moon, sun and natural world. To the miracle of engineering that is the mechanical clock which revolutionised how we see ourselves and the world around us.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

This is a silver pocket watch made in 1885, and it's got a 16 two beat train, which is the number of ticks per hour. I'll see if you can hear it …

ROMA AGRAWAL

So, Rebecca, you said you fell into watchmaking. Can you tell us a little bit about your story of how you got to where you are today?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

By accident in many ways. So yeah, I got into a grammar school. It was a very academic school. I gather this is quite a similar experience. You're taught science and art are two very different subjects, and you can have a successful career studying the sciences and mathematics or, you know, that the arts really are just a hobby and no one has a successful job as an artist. So we were really pushed in this direction and I took pure sciences for my A levels and I just ended up feeling really lost. I've always been really creative. I missed that, I really missed that, and I really struggled, and I actually dropped out of school and ran away to art school, which was pretty frowned upon at the time. I remember getting my AS results and one of my teachers saying “are you sure this is a good idea Rebecca, you're actually doing quite well?” Like, that's gonna be it for me now. But I did. I ran away to art school and I started studying jewellery and silversmithing. So I started off doing a B Tech national, which is really practical, really hands on. So it's all at the bench, foundation skills, how to use a piercing saw, how to use a drill, how to file. And I started developing just organically this interest in making really basic pieces of jewellery that could move. So whether it was articulation or automator. It was doing that that some of my work was spotted at an university exhibition by some of the watchmaking students. He came over and was like, “ohh, that's interesting Rebecca, have you ever thought about watch making?” And I was like, no, I didn't know you could do that. I thought watchmaking was changing batteries and things. I didn't know that was a career. And yeah, they invited me up to their workshop, and I just set foot through the door and thought, yeah, this is it. This is what I want to do in my life. Yeah. They couldn't get rid of me. And one of them literally couldn't get rid of me because one of them is now my husband, so …

ROMA AGRAWAL

That's excellent. And so you and your husband have your own business. So can you tell us a bit about that and what you do?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Yeah. So that started in 2012 and we were living in London at the time and we'd worked as… well, we've worked a few different jobs. But Craig was a restorer. And I was buying and selling watches. And I had a really bad day at work. I was really struggling and I had a bit of a, well, a bit of a breakdown really. And Craig just said “I can't see you like this, let's set up our own company, do our own thing.” He'd done it briefly before, so we went to the bank to get a tiny tiny bank loan and set up our own business, moved back to Birmingham, got married. And set up a workshop in the same month, and started off just restoring watches and then slowly you get to the point you've made virtually every component for someone else's watch. So we thought let's see how far we can take this and start making parts for our own watches. And yeah, we did. It took six years, but we got there in the end. We still do some restoration because it's such an important part of our design process. We're great believers that the most beautiful designs have already been made. So we kind of look back to look forwards, but we like to combine them. So this recent watch was inspired by something that was made in the 1880s with bronze alloys that were developed for Formula One. So you kind of got this mad fusion of new and old. And yeah, it's fun.

ROMA AGRAWAL

I love the idea of using all this kind of cutting edge material and then using mechanism styles from a century ago. It sounds fascinating, so the business is Struthers Watchmakers and you've also written an incredible book called Hands of Time. So can you maybe just tell us a little bit about your book?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Yeah, sure. It's a history of time, told through the objects we invented to measure it, and it takes us back 40,000 years to the first possible timekeeper which was the carved bone that might be an early lunar calendar. Right the way through to atomic time and time on Mars.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Rebecca, I have a beautiful clock which is made out of concrete, like the actual dial. And the mechanism that was attached to that, basically for the battery, stopped working. And I've taken that apart but not put on a new one. So I'm going to have to invite you down to London just to sort out this ridiculous thing that's lying on my desk and has been for months.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

I think you can do it. Persevere. Send me some photos.

ROMA AGRAWAL

I don't have the right tools. This is my problem. I don't have the right tools, and I'm going to come to tools because I know that you love your tools. Can you tell me about why you have various German characters in your workshop? Were they German or am I making that up?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Bit of everything. Yeah. So this all came about when we first set up with that teeny tiny bank loan, which was a terrible idea in retrospect, but we survived. And yeah, we couldn't really afford state-of-the-art tools. We just couldn't. So we use something … an 8mm lathe, 8mm referring to the size of the collet that takes the work in the headstock. Probably about 30 grand now and this business loan was 15, that had to get us everything. The property, the workbenches, the hand tools, everything. So it wasn't an option. And because we're both magpies and like fixing things we just hunted on eBay, people's garages. shed floors, boxes, and found these beautiful old machines and started restoring them and putting them together so we could then use them to restore the watches. We've got Helga and Heidi, who are a pair of East German lathes. We've got MAUS who's a 6mm lorch. She's also German. She's tiny. Hence MAUS. Albert, who's also German. He's a milling machine. We've got George. He's British. He's a drill. Adam, he's German, but he was named after the friend who kindly gave him to us. That's another thing we do. We name a few machines after people who've gifted them. Or Barney. He's named after a dog.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Oh, that's so sweet. So you've got all these tools and you're making watches by hand and you've talked about how you've made almost every component of a watch by hand. Why don't you use software operated machines to do the manufacturing? Now that that's a possibility.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Well, that would be the sensible way of doing things. Yeah, we definitely do things the long way round and that's the way most watches are made. And six years later, we know why. Everything takes so much longer. And yeah, like your research and development, you're prototyping. Just everything is done manually. But we love it. We love getting our hands dirty. I think if we weren't doing it this way, we'd just lose the passion for it. And as long as we have enough clients who are interested and don't mind waiting sometimes years for us to make them watches … we love making them this way and we wouldn't want to change that.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Is this kind of watch making a bit of a dying art? You know, are we starting to lose these kind of skills?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Well, it was categorised or has been categorised as a critically endangered skill in the UK. Even in Switzerland where we now consider the home of the world's watchmaking industry … they're losing a lot of these really traditional skills as well. Saying that, there is a massive resurgence in interest. So we call it independent watchmaking, and the scene for independent watchmaking is the most successful it's been, really, probably since the advent of the big brands, so over 100 years now. But it's going to take time, I think, for the skills to hopefully catch up again. And we've lost a lot of skills as well because they've died out and not been passed on and will take time to be revived.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Take me back now and tell me what happened before mechanical type keeping. How did our ancestors tell the time?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

The evidence that we have, and this is all based on what we can kind of piece together because obviously this is pre written language. So we have no record, we'll never know for sure. What we believe is that time keeping started off being something quite close and personal to us. So we were tracking things that were relevant to our day-to-day existence. And then this expanded out to longer and longer periods of time, so lunar calendars would have been particularly important in tracking female reproductive cycles and planning pregnancy and childbirth. This is really important to our ancestors because as soon as we could start tracking time over durations, so counting months and years, we could count seasons, predict seasonal change, and we could start to farm. That was a huge turning point for civilization because you can organise farming, and we no longer have to hunt and gather to feed ourselves for the day. We can busy ourselves building cities and starting communities and civilizations and all the wonderful things that went with that. And as we get into the age of civilization, things like trade become very important as well. So organising ourselves. So this is where we get into time keeping devices to help us divide the day into smaller and smaller parcels of time. Starting with sundials. The earliest example of a sundial that we would recognise today is about 3 1/2 thousand years old from Ancient Egypt. Also clepsydra - water clocks - started to be used at a similar sort of time. One of the incredible things I think about this is the way that they started to crop up all around the world at very similar times. So this is clearly a universal human need to start understanding the passage of time around this era. So you can't explain all of it by saying, “oh well, people must have seen something.” It clearly ran deeper than that.

ROMA AGRAWAL

And that's a really interesting point. So what are some of the stark differences in the way cultures perceive or record time that you found?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

There are so many different ways of interpreting time and the passage of time. It is as unique as we are, and hugely diverse. So you get cultural differences in whether or not we place more emphasis on the past, present or future. The way we record events, so using things like event based timekeeping, still very culturally important. To understand our placement based on our past, as opposed to kind of the Western looking towards our future to dictate to us what we should be doing next, and looking at forward goals to actually understand who you are and where you came from is another huge cultural difference that we have. In fact I spoke to a philosopher who said that there are so many different ways of telling the time we need timekeepers because it would just be too much for our brains to handle. It's just too much for us to deal with. This is why we've all developed our own little ways.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So can you tell us a little bit about the engineering that got us from, you know, the very first time pieces that we created to where we are today?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

The big step forward was in 1088 with Su Song’s hybrid hydro-mechanical clock, and this took clepsydras that had already existed - so using water as a power source effectively to track the passage of time - and introduced something mechanical that we call an escapement. Now the escapement is the series of components that still exist to this day in virtually every mechanical watch and clock that alternately checks and releases the power from the power source.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So just to give an example of that, if I'm thinking of like a church clock tower, for example, they often had a heavy weight that hung from them. And if we just let that weight fall under gravity, it would fall from the top of the clock tower to the bottom in seconds, right? Depending on how high it was. But what your escapement is doing is saying hold on, I'm gonna regulate how quickly this weight is descending, so that's that's a form of escapement right?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Yeah, exactly. It's a bit that ticks. So 1088 was the world's first tick tock. That worked in countries where you had better, should we say temperatures, better climate, where water wouldn't freeze.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So not the UK.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Yeah. So Europe is a little less consistent than the ideal climate. This is where fully mechanical clocks come to the forefront, and this is during the latter half of the 14th century. One of the oldest examples is at Salisbury Cathedral. As you say, these were driven by huge weights, so instead of water as the power source, gravity was the power source, but they still had an escapement. So it's just kind of moving along in this process of taking it to the next level of technology to better suit the environment that we need timekeepers in.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So the accuracy and the technology of the escapements, the springs that we use … Basically there was a kind of exponential improvement in all of this and that's taken us across a number of centuries and decades. But then I hear about atomic time. So can you explain to us what that means?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Yeah, so this is time kept by the vibrations of a caesium atom .... this is way beyond what I normally do as well, so this isn't my specialist area, but it's incredibly accurate, which is really important for the modern world, so no mechanical timekeeper will ever be as good as a quartz. No quartz will ever be as good as atomic time, and that is now the world standard for time. So if we have a smartphone or our laptop, that's where the time’s coming from, and it's essential for everything from media, radio broadcasts. Financial transactions all rely on it. And this is all operated on atomic time, which is accurate to within a second in hundreds of thousands of years.

ROMA AGRAWAL

The accuracy or the precision of the timekeeping comes from the number of beats per second. Can you just give us a bit of an idea? If you compare the kind of mechanical watches that you're making by hand to a quartz crystal, to an atomic clock?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

IN mechanical timekeepers, so the pocket watch with a 16 two beat train, that's a pretty slow train, we don't make them at that speed normally now. Typically they have a beat of sort of 1800 to 20 or 21 thousand, 600 beats per hour. The fastest beat mechanical watches have a beat of over 100,000, and that's measured in Hertz, then. Quartz … I don't know. I don't know the vibration! Really fast.

ROMA AGRAWAL

We're talking about like 10s of thousands a second as opposed to kind of 10s of thousands an hour. So there's like orders of magnitude difference between that technology versus an atomic clock.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Absolutely. I mean, this is the thing with time. And another kind of interesting parallel between timekeepers is time speeds up, and our technological advance speeds up with time, and our experience of it in the modern world as well. If you look back to the earliest watches, portable timekeepers. You didn't have a minute hand on them. They just had an hour hand and part of that has been argued because they weren't accurate enough to warrant a minute hand. But the other theory behind it is that we didn't need to know the time more accurately than to within roughly around the hour at this point in our history, because before trains and planes and accurate working hours and things we just didn't need to know things that accurately. Things were a lot more relaxed. It all went wrong with the industrial Revolution. That's where I blame.

ROMA AGRAWAL

I mean, a lot of things went wrong with the industrial revolution. We could have another podcast on that topic. So I mean, what do you make of the fact that people like me, all of us with our mobile phones, are checking the time multiple times an hour I guess.

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Yeah, it's so easy to do. Now time has consumed our lives in a way that would have, I think, blown our ancestors’ minds. So the first time keepers were there to help us live a better life, to help us understand things like farming or growing food, us not starving and living a more comfortable and happier existence. And yet it's turned into something completely different, where what used to help us now dictates to us.

ROMA AGRAWAL

No, I agree. I think we've almost become so beholden to time. Like time controls us rather than the other way around I feel. And with anxiety and mental health and all of these sorts of things, you know, I really wonder how much this kind of obsessive timekeeping plays into that. So now that atomic clocks are allowing us to keep a second accuracy over hundreds of thousands of years. Do we need more precision and accuracy in time keeping? Like what is next in the engineering of time keeping?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

I actually don't know how much more accurate we can get it. The big change I see coming in timekeeping is our understanding of time itself. Our understanding of time, as humans, we are earth based creatures living around the circadian rhythm of 24 hours a day. Obviously, that's only relevant on Earth. So as we start to adventure further out into space and onto other planets or the moon, our understanding of time and the way we experience it will cease to hold meaning. And you know, how do we keep in time contact with a spaceship that's out in deep space with people on it? That is gonna be interesting. I mean, the Martian Day is quite similar to ours, so that shouldn't be too bad. The Lunar Day is a month long as well as their month being a month long. So that would be a different experience.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So are the frontiers with time, related to engineering, now going to be not so much about the timekeeping itself, but how we adapt to these different environments?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

I think so. I did speak to an atomic physicist about this, who said “We're going to reach a limit of how accurately we can tell time.” I mean, you never know. They probably said that 100 years ago and look at us now, so who knows? But yeah, I mean how we're going to comprehend time … that was revolutionary even when it came to speeding up things like communications between Europe and the US or the Far East, you know that completely made the world feel smaller when we could suddenly pick up the phone to someone. How we'll maintain those relationships the further away from our home we travel? Yeah, sci-fi. The answer is in sci-fi.

ROMA AGRAWAL

And if you wanted our listeners to kind of come away from this conversation and notice one new thing about time, what would that be?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

I think a lot of us might have lost contact with the amount that we can actually tell about the time without looking at our watches. And it's actually a really lovely process when you start to understand how you can look at the position of the sun to give you an approximate time of day. If you can see the sun depending on your weather. But telling things like North and South from the moss on a tree or watching seasonal change, something we really lose track of. I was born and raised in Birmingham, only lived in Birmingham and London, then moved out to the country a few years ago. And seeing seasonal change is such a magical thing. You can tell sometimes within a week whether or not migratory animals are arriving. You can get an idea of what time it is. It's so lovely reconnecting, going back to basics and taking a bit more note of nature’s cues for us, rather than having to look at our watches all the time.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So that's the natural stuff. What would the takeaway be for engineers and engineering?

REBECCA STRUTHERS

Ah well. I love machines, so machines are a wonderful thing. I mean, obviously everything has gone much more the way of tech, so computers and, yeah, like quartz watches, atomic time. But there's so much beauty in machinery, and I think it's easy to forget that when things are so kind of CNC produced that actually making machines by hand or partially by hand or finishing them by hand … They're very beautiful creations. And again, kind of like, it's an object that humans have invented just because we love inventing things. And there's a real pleasure in that.

ROMA AGRAWAL

So patterns in nature and beauty and engineering. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's wonderful.

ROMA’S OUTRO

It is always such a joy speaking to Rebecca, and I was lucky enough to actually visit her workshop and see her in action a few years ago when I was researching my own book. It really fascinates me how she spends hours and hours of every day, day after day, looking at these really, really tiny, tiny things, you know, looking through magnifying glasses and her loupe lens, all because of the fascination that humans have to tell the time, this instinct to want to record it really accurately and precisely. And also when I look at her workshop. I'm looking at all these incredible tools and machines that she's using. And it's very clear that engineering has played such a crucial role in creating the watches and clocks that have laid the foundations for modern civilization as we know it.

You've been listening to Create The Future, a podcast from the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and Peanut & Crumb. This episode was presented by me, Roma Agrawal, and was produced by Jude Shapiro. Look out for future episodes with conversations from pioneering engineers, designers, technologists, and thinkers. To find out more, follow QEPrize on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. See you next time.