Luxury Insider

We are probably living in – or more accurately, about to enter - the most innovative and creative period in watchmaking history. New design and manufacturing technology has revolutionized the methods and speed with which product development is undertaken, and allows new scope for different forms of components that were unimaginable only ten years ago. The ease with which components can be designed, on ever more user-friendly software that assures precision drawings with little effort, which at the click of a mouse can be converted into a dozen different formats, provides for an amazingly powerful tool.

Combine computer-aided design (CAD) with the multitude of new technologies for producing components, and a new world begins to reveal itself. Systems of production now exist where components can be machined using a diversity of specialized cutters made from new alloys on five-axe milling machines, which can produce components to microns of precision. Other systems have been developed whereby components can virtually be grown, which before today, could never be made using any other existing form of conventional machining.

There exists a market for items which are original in design, function, and execution within a market whose size seems to be growing exponentially, creating the demand for increasingly challenging ideas in an increasingly competitive sphere.

Every six months, a new brand appears with another difference. Some will live and grow, while others will not; fifty years from today, even those that did not will find a place in the collectors' realm since they would have marked a changing point in watchmaking history. The number of collectors and buyers will increase; a number of them – those on a higher level of collecting – will become ever more discerning to the products available, whilst at the base of the pyramid there will be more interest in watchmaking at a broader level than has ever existed before on the basis of the mechanics as opposed to the mass image and culture created by publicity.

As for watchmakers themselves, a new generation who no longer make components using pointers, lathes, and conventional milling machines will emerge. Instead, they will use computers, comparators, and state-of-the-art CNC machines that will be ten times easier to use than today and ten times more accurate – if not more – at a fraction of the cost, with the potential to make bridges, wheels, pinions, levers, springs in brass, German silver, steel, titanium, as well as the numerous new alloys which will inevitably appear in the oncoming years, all at the click of a mouse.

Watchmakers will be far from redundant and their skills will need to adapt to the multitude of different products that will permeate the market. Inevitably, watch mechanisms will become more complicated and the watchmaker's skill will need to improve considerably in order to effectively maneuver through this increasingly complex and intricate world.

The mechanical watch once died with the advent of the quartz watch. It has since been brought back to life, and – regardless of the technological advances – is here to stay, not because of the need for precision timekeeping or to wear the date on your wrist, but because human nature is driven to seek out beauty and will always be fascinated by mechanical innovation.

Ultimately, human imagination cannot be replaced by the new technologies, but these new technologies can most certainly help the imagination to explore a multitude of previously unforeseen avenues; as a super hero once said, ‘To infinity and beyond.’