Time Waits for No Man

Allen Ames sits in his well-worn chair at his well-worn work bench while working with his well-worn tools on a customer’s watch. Semi-retired from watchmaking, the 74-year-old still plugs away in his basement, stopping by a Wichita jewelry store each week to pick up the broken watches that customers have dropped off. All these watches share a common problem: they do not accurately measure time. That is something they have in common with human beings. Even Allen Ames.

“You think, ‘My God, I can’t believe a year has gone by so fast,’” Ames said.

Despite what Mick Jagger said, time is not on our side. Journalist Ephrat Livni details Duke University mechanical engineering professor Adrian Bejan’s research into the perception of time passing:

As a person ages, his conception of the passage of time becomes distorted. When we get older, the rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases because of several transforming physical features, including vision, brain complexity, and later in life, degradation of the pathways that transmit information. And this shift in image processing leads to the sense of time speeding up.

Since the 1800s, the wristwatch and its predecessor, the pocket watch, have been the antidote to that human weakness. Everywhere he goes, the watch-wearer can be assured that the passage of time is being accurately measured. No tee times or piano rehearsals missed. The sweep of the day’s procession carefully measured out in seconds, minutes and hours. That is, unless you introduce water to the equation.

“The worst thing for watches is water and people love to put them in water. That was the thing that drove me crazy. Years ago, they put the word ‘waterproof’ on them. They outlawed that several years ago – a long time ago. They were water resistant to a lot of different standards. I had people come in and their watch was all rusty. ‘Well, I shower with it every day.’ ‘Why do you do that?’ ‘Well, it’s waterproof.’ ‘Well, it’s not.’ … I’ve probably said it 10,000 times, but watches and water don’t go together,” Ames said.

“Several years ago” versus “a long time ago”? Measurement of time is flimsy in the brain of Ames and any other human, especially one past middle age. The state of the watchmaking profession, or horology, has turned flimsy as well. Time is not on their side. The advent of the smartphone, and now the smartwatch, threatens the livelihood of the already shrinking community of watchmakers.

“[There were] at least eight to 10 watchmakers in Wichita. Compared to now, when there’s one,” Ames said.

But watchmaking has been through tumult before. When Ames attended Oklahoma State Tech to learn his trade in the early 1970s, he was trained to repair mechanical watches. But as luck would have it, the quartz revolution had just begun. New watches, powered by batteries instead of a winding process, would soon storm the marketplace.

“We went to a seminar. We’d been in class maybe a year by then. The place was all dark and they had these cubes sitting on pillars. They turned these things on and it told the time. We just went to school for mechanical watches and we walked out of that place thinking, ‘Oh man, what are we doing here?’” Ames said.

Not only were the new quartz watches cheaper to make, but they kept better time than any mechanical watch.

“A very good running Rolex will keep pretty close to the same time [as quartz]. But you could get a $30 watch now that’s gonna keep as good of time as a $10,000 Rolex,” Ames said.

But the allure of a beautiful mechanical watch endures. The complexity of the process is itself fascinating to behold. A main spring is coiled inside the watch case. As the owner winds the knob, called a crown, the main spring tightens and tension builds. That tension is released through a series of gears, or wheels. If nothing were to stop that energy, the wheels would move freely and the energy would be released without purpose. But a watch can tell us the time precisely because that energy is harnessed and controlled. The form of that control is called the escapement.

“The escapement is the heart and soul of any mechanical watch. The balance wheel, the hair spring, the pallet fork, the escape wheel,” Ames said.

The pallet fork, a tiny, three-pronged piece of metal that resembles a Klingon battlecruiser, temporarily keeps the escape wheel from turning. It rocks back and forth, regulating the release of the energy stored in the main spring. All this metal moving around would result in a watch wearing itself out if it weren’t for the rubies inside.

“They are imitation rubies. They used to be real, years ago. If you just had a hole through the brass, you’d have metal against metal. A metal pivot turning in a metal hole, it will wear into the metal. Unless the jewel gets cracked, it will turn in there forever. You put oil in there as well,” Ames said.

Over his 32 years working a rented countertop at Gessler’s drugstore in Normandie Center in Wichita, Ames saw the share of his work devoted to mechanical watches shrink over time. Quartz watches became a majority, then a large majority of his business.

“You can definitely make money selling batteries. I used to have a very good battery business. You can do it right then and there. … It’s quick money,” Ames said.

The timelessness of the profession is part of the allure for Ames. Despite the impact of quartz watches and their battery-powered movement, the mechanical watch endures. The popularity of Rolex in popular culture is a testament to that.

“It hasn’t changed that much. They are still the same basic thing. They still have escapements in them. Different material, a little lighter, more technology in it, but still the same thing as 130 years ago,“ Ames said.

The future of the trade is uncertain. Bling culture, with its gaudy large-faced watches, keeps demand alive for now. Will people keep wearing wristwatches?

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, to tell you the truth. As far as regular watches, I kind of doubt it. It’s gonna take a while, but I think I got out at the right time,” Ames said.