Early mainsprings delivered uneven force, so watches used a fusee — a cone wound with a miniature chain of hundreds of hand-riveted links, each smaller than a grain of rice. Around Christchurch in southern England the chains were famously made by women and children, including workhouse children, paid piece rates for eye-destroying work. The going barrel and better springs made the fusee obsolete in watches by the late 1800s, and the trade vanished with it.
Fusee chain maker no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
c. 1500 – 1675
The watch escapes the clock tower
Mainspring power let locksmiths in Nuremberg and Augsburg shrink clocks into wearable drums and spheres, and the new craft spread through the German cities to France, Geneva and London. These verge-escapement watches could err by an hour a day, so the trade's value lay in goldsmithing and status as much as timekeeping; Calvin's ban on jewelry in Geneva accidentally built the future capital of the industry by forcing the city's jewelers into watchmaking.
What else was happening then
1675
Huygens adds the balance spring
Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens fits a spiral spring to the balance wheel, giving it a natural oscillation period for the first time. Accuracy improves from a fraction of an hour to a few minutes per day at a stroke, watches gain minute hands, and a bitter priority dispute with England's Robert Hooke — who had shown a spring-regulated balance years earlier — begins immediately.
1761
Harrison's H4 solves longitude at sea
John Harrison's 1.4-kilogram watch H4 sails from Portsmouth to Jamaica aboard HMS Deptford and loses about five seconds in 81 days — accuracy that finally lets navigators compute longitude, the problem Britain's 1714 Longitude Act had priced at £20,000. The Board of Longitude resisted paying for years; Harrison received his final award in 1773, aged 80, after King George III took up his case.
1801
Breguet patents the tourbillon
In Paris, Abraham-Louis Breguet patents the tourbillon, a rotating cage that carries the balance and escapement through all vertical positions to average out the errors gravity causes in a pocket watch. Commercially marginal for two centuries, it became the signature complication of the modern luxury revival — and a standard test piece for elite watchmakers ever since.
1854
The American system reaches watchmaking
Aaron Lufkin Dennison and Edward Howard's factory — from 1854 established at Waltham, Massachusetts — applies the interchangeable-parts methods Dennison had admired at the Springfield Armory to watches. Machine-made Walthams undercut hand-fitted European work so badly that Swiss observers sent to the 1876 Philadelphia exhibition went home warning their industry to mechanize or die.
Where that work lives now
The craftsman who builds and revives the tiny machine on the wrist — a trade that survived the quartz crisis and now has more work than trained hands.
⌚ Watchmaker →