Swiss Watch Schools

1895

The Progress of the Student Through the Great Manufactories.

The school the writer visited is the extensive one at Geneva. Being provided with the requisite permission and escorted by an alumnus of the institution, he was shown every courtesy and afforded every opportunity to observe.

One is first ushered into the beginner's room. To enter a boy must be at least 14. He will first be introduced to a wood turning lathe and set at turning out tool handles. He will be kept at this from eight days to seven weeks, according to aptitude. Then he will be advanced to the work of filing and shaping screwdrivers and similar tools. These and all other tools which he may afterward make will be his own. Being in course of time to some extent provided with tools, he will undertake making a large wooden pattern of a watch frame perhaps as large as a dining plate. After he has learned just how the frame is to be shaped he is given a ready cut one of brass of the ordinary size, and he begins drilling the holes for the wheels and screws. All along the master stands over him and instructs him. The circular pieces of brass which are put into his hands here he will go on with, and when the watch is completed that, too, will be his own.

He is then taught to make other fine tools and to finish the frame ready to receive the wheels.

Then he will leave the first room and pass up into one where he is taught to fit the stem winding parts and to do other fine cutting and filing by hand, to make watches that will strike the hour, minute, etc., for which class of work the Swiss are famous. One can readily conceive how exceedingly minute and exact such workmanship must be, particularly on the minute snail — that is, the guide which permits and arrests the striking, so that in addition to the hour and the quarter the very minute shall be sounded. — Theodore B. Wilson in Popular Science Monthly.