I started thinking about making an electronic wristwatch after designing and making a series of synchronous digital microsecond timers for my visual effects business. Those designs had, over several iterations, become a kind of Swiss army knife of electronic chronograph functions that I could mine for wristwatch features and miniaturize in an ASIC. However, as I started thinking about wristwatch design in a historical context I couldn't help but find myself drawn to the history of mechanical watches. Here in Switzerland where I live that history resonates in the most beautiful ways one can imagine.

As my passion for the history of timekeeping grew, making a digital wristwatch lost its appeal. I also realized that there was no better way for me to study Swiss history than to study traditional watchmaking -- and vice versa. The mechanics of vintage watches can appear impenetrable without an appreciation of who made them, how they were made and when. That history can likewise seem boring without an understanding of the intricate details of how they function. While that might sound like a double-whammy of boring it's actually insanely exciting when you start connecting both to the tides of cultural, religious, technological, and political change that Swiss horology was born of and evolved within.

To give just one example: Abraham-Louis Breguet, born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1747, under the control of the Kingdom of Prussia at the time, made dozens of contributions to mechanical watchmaking that are still in use today. How is that possible? Was Breguet such a genius that no one in the past three centuries has been able to match him, even given the head start of not having to reinvent his inventions? Did he discover fundamental mechanical designs that can't be improved upon in the same way that the fundamentals of math can't be improved upon? Or is it simply that few have dared to discard his designs in favor of modern alternatives lest they should be branded heretics for dishonoring his place in history? Breguet's clients included Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte, making him fantastically wealthy. When he was marked for execution himself during the French revolution he fled from Paris to London and made timepieces for King George III. As a result he kept his head for another thirty years and took his clock and watchmaking to even greater heights.

From the opposite perspective, how many other geniuses have made significant contributions to the art of watchmaking that have gone uncredited? Or conversely, how many bad ideas were implemented and appeared over the centuries and then disappeared as soon as they were replaced with better solutions? Both of those numbers are enormous. Each one of those improvements and mistakes is fascinating, and almost every watch ever made contains examples of both.

The mechanical engineering in watches is both a language and a code: a language in the sense that there is beauty and history in their form, and a code in the sense that the proper functioning of the mechanical division, multiplication and display of time is determined by inalterable principals of physics. Watches are both functional and aesthetic because they must both keep time and evoke the passion of their wearer: you.

Will I actually design and make a complete mechanical wristwatch of my own someday? Who knows? But I do know that I will be measuring my every step towards doing so against hundreds of years of history. And knowing that makes every moment that I spend researching that history exhilarating.