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.

Firstborn Children Strongest

1901

It would seem that firstborn children excel later born children in height and weight. This may be due to the greater vigor of the mother at the birth of the first child.

In England it was found that growth degenerates as we go lower in the social scale, there being a difference of even five inches in height between the best and worst fed classes in the community.

An investigation of 10,000 children in Switzerland showed that children born in summer are taller for their age than those born in winter. As a majority of children in the public schools are poor, in winter their parents are forced to economize more on account of expense of heating. Their rooms are also liable to be small and poorly ventilated, while in summer they are out in the fresh air. Food is also cheaper and more varied. The influence of unhealthy conditions on a very young child would be much greater than when it is older and better able to resist them. — Everybody's Magazine.

Have Got Beyond Feeling

1902

The people of Martinique, or those who still cling to that unfortunate island, will probably not be alarmed by the scientific report that it is likely to sink out of sight, says the Chicago Inter Ocean. They are probably beyond the reach of alarm by this time.


Lucky Old Maids

Woman insure against being old maids in Denmark, says the New York Mail and Express. If they marry before they are 40 what they have paid goes to the less fortunate, and these last are pensioned for the remainder of their lives on a scale proportioned on what they paid in.


Starving in Galicia

In Galicia the wage of the farm laborer has been so reduced that he is starving to death on a pittance of from three to 16 cents a day.


Index of Cleanliness

The average French person uses six pounds of soap in a year; the average English person uses ten pounds.


Will Follow a Swiss Model

Swiss postal officials are to be employed to assist in the reorganization of the Japanese post office. The Swiss postal system is to be taken as a model.

A Delightful Prison

1903

It is very doubtful if there is anywhere a more delightful prison than that of Tobel, in Switzerland. There are very few guards, not more than one to every 25 prisoners, and they never think of carrying arms. The prisoners' cells are constantly open, so that the inmates can easily communicate with each other and can tell at any time what the guards are doing.

Moreover, the prisoners are allowed to have paper, ink, newspapers, cider and various dainties from the kitchen, including fried eggs, of which they are very fond. One would suppose that prisoners would not desire to leave such an earthly paradise as this, yet three notorious murderers — Lohrer, Schmid and Hess — quietly strolled away from it recently, and, it is said, have not as yet shown any inclination to return.


Bygone London Customs

In Edward Longshank's days persons living in the city were allowed to keep swine "within their houses." But these Plantagenet pigs were not to occupy sites that encroached on the streets. At a later day the permission to keep them even within one's house would seem to have been limited to master bakers.

Ancestor of Pictorial Postcards

1910

It was in Switzerland that the mania for pictorial postcards first arose, and we well remember the astonishment evoked some dozen years ago at seeing at the Theodule Hut the excitement of a party of Germans upon their ascertaining that they could dispatch thence, via Italy, a sheaf of views of the Matterhorn.

If one may judge from the very interesting collection of old Alpine prints now on view at the Alpine club, Saville Row, our ancestors were also eager to carry away souvenirs of scenes unlike any to which they were accustomed, and of which the terrors and dangers were doubtless not unexaggerated. And so the Swiss, who were among the earliest to exploit colored engravings, provided them with material with a sufficient spice of exaggeration to satisfy those who stayed at home.

These they dedicated to the "amateurs of the marvels of nature," and for them they crowded into a single landscape a dozen Staubbachs, and any number of aiguilles and glaciers, with artists portraying them and peasants holding festival beneath them. — London Globe.