An interesting story about reviving a dying trade. From Business Week:
Making Time with the Watchmakers
To combat a shortage of skilled horologists, Rolex is underwriting a free school in Pennsylvania to teach the craft to a new generation.
It's just six months until graduation, and in a bright, clinical classroom, 12 students in crisp white lab coats with round loupes attached to their foreheads and glasses pressed to their noses are sitting on low stools at their work benches. In front of them, under Plexiglas lids that look like miniature cake holders, are tiny disassembled parts, some the size of a grain of salt, others no wider than a human hair. Under the tutelage of a master horologist, the intensely focused individuals are being given a lecture on the Lemania caliber 1873 chronograph, a mechanical timepiece with a 30-minute counter and a small second-hand dial.
It's one of five types of chronographs that by graduation, each of the 12 pupils will be able to take apart, diagnose, handcraft a part for, and repair. The individuals, all second-year students at the Lititz Watch Technicum, are in the final phase of studying what until only recently was considered the dying art of watchmaking.
Launched in 2001 by Rolex USA, the U.S. arm of the venerable 101-year-old Geneva watchmaker, the Lititz Watch Technicum was started in an effort to shore up the shortage of skilled watchmakers in the U.S., which had for decades been on the wane due to the popularity of digital and electronic watches. However, a strong resurgence in mechanical watches in recent years, particularly luxury models, has catapulted demand for horologists, a profession that was not so long ago thought to be going the way of blacksmiths and corset makers.
And a bit of the backstory:
"We were facing a situation today where we needed to foster a new generation of watchmakers," says Charles Berthiaume, the senior vice-president for technical operations at Rolex and the Technicum's president "Thirty to 40 years ago, there was a watchmaker at every jewelry store. That's not the case today," he notes. Since opening, the school, which is partnered with the Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Education Program, has graduated 40 students.
Very cool -- I have been having a lot of fun learning blacksmithing and starting to be able to make what I am thinking about instead of turning out a piece of misshapen metal. I see the work of some of the practicioners of the craft and am amazed. Watchmaking must be very similar -- doing a bit of what I do but on a much smaller scale.
