THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE STARS

Since human prehistory, we’ve been fascinated as a species with the night sky. I’m curious as to how our earliest predecessors must have reacted to the myriad of transformations in the heavens, but it’s easy to forget how these celestial movements helped develop a formula for timekeeping and a sense of the measurement of time. In a recent book, Time Tamed by Nick Foulkes, he discusses the process by which Mankind has attempted to measure time across the ages, from towering water clocks to simple but effective sundials up into the modern age. But it is in astronomy that the greatest developments and influences in watchmaking have emerged, and through them, a system of precision in understanding the movement of celestial objects are translated by many watchmakers in modern wristwatches.

The reason for astronomy’s significance in timekeeping is simple: in agrarian and agricultural civilisations across the world, a knowledge of the seasons, measured through lunar cycles, allowed farmers to plan the year. As such measurements gained in precision, this was shared with the public in city centres, when they would come to buy and sell stock, via massive clock towers that indicated the time and acted as a meeting point for people or official business by local governments. Till today, some of these early pillars of watchmaking remain.

The process of shrinking such astronomical complications down to the miniscule size of a wristwatch, however, is one that’s much more challenging. But it’s never stopped one of the most prolific watch movement developers before, and it’s not about to