I recently listened to Acquired podcast's episode on the history of Rolex, so I've had Swiss watchmaking on the brain. Amazing post. Well written, deeply researched. Thrilling.
Bravo! On behalf of all of us afflicted with mechanical watch disease, thank you! An excellent, well-researched essay that has earned a place of honor on bookshelves already sagging with horological history. Very well done.
Outstanding research and writing! Your piece deeply resonated with me as I began my career as one of the founding engineers at Titan Watches* (India) who was trained in France Ebauche and suppliers in the Jura mountains regions of Switzerland back in 1987.
*Titan Watches was a brave new startup backed by the Tatas that challenged the government owned HMT Watches that had a monopoly in the Indian market.
This leans far too heavily into the “great men of history” trope, using Landes as a cartoon determinist so Biver can be the romantic hero who proves that “human values” trump technology. But Landes’ actual work—particularly in Revolutions in Time and The Unbound Prometheus—is deeply concerned with how institutional structures shape technological adoption and adaptation. He’d never say “quartz is superior, therefore Swiss watches die”; he’d ask why some craft traditions survive technological disruption while others don’t.
The article can’t engage with that because it would reveal that Biver and Hayek weren’t choosing freely from infinite strategic options—they were navigating a constrained space shaped by:
• Path-dependent institutions (the apprenticeship system, the “Swiss Made” regulatory regime)
• Political economy (banks nationalizing the industry, the state implicitly underwriting restructuring)
• Contingent luck (the 1980s fashion for plastic accessories, rising Asian wealth in the 1990s)
They were making do with the affordances available to them in a messy and confusing time. Less “visionary leaders making bold choices” and more “constrained actors improvising within inherited structures during a period of radical uncertainty.“
First, I disagree that the article uses the work of Landes as a cartoon villain.
What I see is that there are only two references to Landes: The first one I perceive it as establishing the fact that *smart* people at the time used to believe that swiss watchmaking was done. And the second reference I perceive it as giving credit to Landes by arguing that *at the time*, he was right to be so pessimistic about swiss watchmaking.
Second, the idea that the post relies on the "great men" trope would be good criticism if the article were a book, or at least, a post of a magazine that claims to be from a historian. This is neither.
This is a blogpost that creates a *story* with human characters at its centre, so that people can become engaged in the narrative. And it works!
As someone who used to have no interest in watches, I couldn't stop reading until the end.
The real world is, obviously, more complex than what a blog post can convey. Hence we can use the different frameworks from the social sciences (path-dependency, etc..) to analyze reality. But that would be a very different magazine!
The idea that the article just uses Landes to show "smart people were pessimistic" proves my point—it reduces him to a technological determinist strawman so Biver can appear to disprove a thesis Landes never held. Landes' actual question—why some craft traditions survive disruption despite technological inferiority—would make Biver's "human values" look like obvious strategy within constraints, not romantic heroism. The article doesn't just misrepresent Landes; it requires his caricature to make the comeback story feel revelatory.
Claiming "it's just a story" is special pleading. The article makes explicit causal claims: "Biver wrote the playbook," "Hayek saw luxury vs. volume as a false dilemma." You can't make historical arguments while ducking behind narrative immunity. Either it's about how the industry survived—requiring accuracy—or it's fiction. Which is it?
The real issue isn't simplification but distortion. Simplification: "Banks nationalized the insolvent industry, forcing Hayek to restructure." Distortion: "Hayek chose to beat the Japanese at mass production"—erasing that liquidation was politically impossible and he inherited ETA's already-developed quartz tech. That's not streamlining; it reverses causation. The article transforms Hayek from a consultant handed an impossible brief into a visionary who chose his strategy. That's not simplification, it's mythmaking.
And engagement doesn't require this distorting choice. Constraint-driven narratives are more dramatic. When Biver's gamble appears as desperate improvisation within inherited institutions, the stakes rise—visionaries can fail against the system. "Great men" always win because you've written the system out of the story.
Finally, "it works!" isn't a defense—it reveals the problem. The story is so satisfying that readers come away believing industrial crises are solved by finding the right CEO. That's not a trade-off; it's a failure of popular history's mission. You've changed the subject from "is this misleading?" to "does engagement justify misleading people?"—answering a question I never asked.
Landes was a much better scholar than wristwatch aficionado. Myth is part of watch collecting, meaning that we love our tropes about Hans Wilsdorf and Kintarō Hattori.
Also, as tropes go, this one was badly chosen, since Blancpain remains a mess, despite the efforts of Piguet and Biver to fix it. By any commercial or artistic standard, they failed badly. Today, Blancpain is widely considered among the weakest Swatch Group performers, constrained spaces or not.
Great post! Re: "The real prize, however, was a quartz wristwatch. The Swiss had set up an industrial laboratory in Neuchâtel in the 1960s to study the technology, but did not pursue it as doggedly as Seiko."
It is only partially true. The first quartz watch to win an international competition, in September 1967, was indeed the Beta 2 developed by the Centre électronique horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The Swiss do not appear to have wanted to turn it into an inexpensive mass-market product, nor did they have the industrial capacity to launch large-scale production at an affordable price, as Seiko did.
This matters, especially for understanding what followed: watchmaking research generated a host of ideas for Swiss entrepreneurs whose inventions, by 2014, were already appearing in the smartwatches of major American manufacturers. Once again, Swiss inventors responded—but this time in the realm of intellectual property.
Very interesting, thank you
Thank you for this post. I was absolutely fascinated by it, as I never knew that watch manufacturing could be so interesting!
Not at all! Thanks Jesus - that's very kind of you to say.
I recently listened to Acquired podcast's episode on the history of Rolex, so I've had Swiss watchmaking on the brain. Amazing post. Well written, deeply researched. Thrilling.
Thank you! Yes - loved that episode, set the standard.
Bravo! On behalf of all of us afflicted with mechanical watch disease, thank you! An excellent, well-researched essay that has earned a place of honor on bookshelves already sagging with horological history. Very well done.
Thanks Marty - that's very kind of you!
Outstanding research and writing! Your piece deeply resonated with me as I began my career as one of the founding engineers at Titan Watches* (India) who was trained in France Ebauche and suppliers in the Jura mountains regions of Switzerland back in 1987.
*Titan Watches was a brave new startup backed by the Tatas that challenged the government owned HMT Watches that had a monopoly in the Indian market.
This leans far too heavily into the “great men of history” trope, using Landes as a cartoon determinist so Biver can be the romantic hero who proves that “human values” trump technology. But Landes’ actual work—particularly in Revolutions in Time and The Unbound Prometheus—is deeply concerned with how institutional structures shape technological adoption and adaptation. He’d never say “quartz is superior, therefore Swiss watches die”; he’d ask why some craft traditions survive technological disruption while others don’t.
The article can’t engage with that because it would reveal that Biver and Hayek weren’t choosing freely from infinite strategic options—they were navigating a constrained space shaped by:
• Path-dependent institutions (the apprenticeship system, the “Swiss Made” regulatory regime)
• Political economy (banks nationalizing the industry, the state implicitly underwriting restructuring)
• Complementary assets (Switzerland’s existing luxury infrastructure)
• Contingent luck (the 1980s fashion for plastic accessories, rising Asian wealth in the 1990s)
They were making do with the affordances available to them in a messy and confusing time. Less “visionary leaders making bold choices” and more “constrained actors improvising within inherited structures during a period of radical uncertainty.“
I think that this criticism is misplaced.
First, I disagree that the article uses the work of Landes as a cartoon villain.
What I see is that there are only two references to Landes: The first one I perceive it as establishing the fact that *smart* people at the time used to believe that swiss watchmaking was done. And the second reference I perceive it as giving credit to Landes by arguing that *at the time*, he was right to be so pessimistic about swiss watchmaking.
Second, the idea that the post relies on the "great men" trope would be good criticism if the article were a book, or at least, a post of a magazine that claims to be from a historian. This is neither.
This is a blogpost that creates a *story* with human characters at its centre, so that people can become engaged in the narrative. And it works!
As someone who used to have no interest in watches, I couldn't stop reading until the end.
The real world is, obviously, more complex than what a blog post can convey. Hence we can use the different frameworks from the social sciences (path-dependency, etc..) to analyze reality. But that would be a very different magazine!
The idea that the article just uses Landes to show "smart people were pessimistic" proves my point—it reduces him to a technological determinist strawman so Biver can appear to disprove a thesis Landes never held. Landes' actual question—why some craft traditions survive disruption despite technological inferiority—would make Biver's "human values" look like obvious strategy within constraints, not romantic heroism. The article doesn't just misrepresent Landes; it requires his caricature to make the comeback story feel revelatory.
Claiming "it's just a story" is special pleading. The article makes explicit causal claims: "Biver wrote the playbook," "Hayek saw luxury vs. volume as a false dilemma." You can't make historical arguments while ducking behind narrative immunity. Either it's about how the industry survived—requiring accuracy—or it's fiction. Which is it?
The real issue isn't simplification but distortion. Simplification: "Banks nationalized the insolvent industry, forcing Hayek to restructure." Distortion: "Hayek chose to beat the Japanese at mass production"—erasing that liquidation was politically impossible and he inherited ETA's already-developed quartz tech. That's not streamlining; it reverses causation. The article transforms Hayek from a consultant handed an impossible brief into a visionary who chose his strategy. That's not simplification, it's mythmaking.
And engagement doesn't require this distorting choice. Constraint-driven narratives are more dramatic. When Biver's gamble appears as desperate improvisation within inherited institutions, the stakes rise—visionaries can fail against the system. "Great men" always win because you've written the system out of the story.
Finally, "it works!" isn't a defense—it reveals the problem. The story is so satisfying that readers come away believing industrial crises are solved by finding the right CEO. That's not a trade-off; it's a failure of popular history's mission. You've changed the subject from "is this misleading?" to "does engagement justify misleading people?"—answering a question I never asked.
Landes was a much better scholar than wristwatch aficionado. Myth is part of watch collecting, meaning that we love our tropes about Hans Wilsdorf and Kintarō Hattori.
Also, as tropes go, this one was badly chosen, since Blancpain remains a mess, despite the efforts of Piguet and Biver to fix it. By any commercial or artistic standard, they failed badly. Today, Blancpain is widely considered among the weakest Swatch Group performers, constrained spaces or not.
Great post! Re: "The real prize, however, was a quartz wristwatch. The Swiss had set up an industrial laboratory in Neuchâtel in the 1960s to study the technology, but did not pursue it as doggedly as Seiko."
It is only partially true. The first quartz watch to win an international competition, in September 1967, was indeed the Beta 2 developed by the Centre électronique horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The Swiss do not appear to have wanted to turn it into an inexpensive mass-market product, nor did they have the industrial capacity to launch large-scale production at an affordable price, as Seiko did.
This matters, especially for understanding what followed: watchmaking research generated a host of ideas for Swiss entrepreneurs whose inventions, by 2014, were already appearing in the smartwatches of major American manufacturers. Once again, Swiss inventors responded—but this time in the realm of intellectual property.
https://sokiosque.substack.com/p/the-swiss-patents-behind-the-smartwatch
Fascinating article!
Too many lessons to gleam from this but most notably the business and intersection of psychology, consumers and technology. Wonderful piece.