The British Museum Watches


Author: David Thompson

175 pages, 270 illustrations.

The collection of watches held by the British Museum is unsurpassed anywhere in the world, and spans an astonishing five hundred years. All forms of watch are represented in the collection, from sixteenth-century early stackfreed watches made in south Germany to exquisite decorative watches of the seventeenth century, right through to watches from the modern age.

This lively book tells the story of the watch through major examples in the collection, representing all the principal makers of Europe and America. They include Thomas Tompion, a London watchmaker whose reputation stretched far and wide even in his own time, and the Swiss-born Abraham Louis Breguet, who lived and worked in Paris supplying the best watches that money could buy to the crowned heads and aristocratic families of the western world. Following the high precision of these horological giants, the Museum's holdings are brought up to the minute with some of the first wristwatches. There are also pin-pallet lever watches made for the mass market during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by companies such as Waterbury and Ingersoll, along with early examples of electro-mechanical watches and the quartz revolution.

Seventy-seven watches are discussed in all, accompanied by over 270 striking new photographs. Many details of the intricate mechanical movements are included, alowing the reader a rare insight into their inner workings, as well as their outer beauty.