An unfinished brass wall clock Arnold has been building for the past several years. The engraving was done by a late friend from Chicago, and the bearings and jewels he bought elsewhere. “Other than that, everything here I made.”
On a recent weekday, David Arnold, a certified master clockmaker with a workshop on Logan Street, Uptown, removed an antique pocket watch from a small brown envelope and began taking it to pieces.
The watch, made in 1908 by the Elgin National Watch Company, some thirty miles outside Chicago, was about the size of a hockey puck, with a tarnished silveroid case and a porcelain dial. One of Arnold’s regular customers, an avid collector, had sent it in for a basic tune-up: a cleaning and polishing, change of oil, possibly a replacement mainspring. But once the watch was open, Arnold knew, he might find more to attend to. “In an old watch,” he says, “Lord only knows what you’re gonna find.”
He pried open the case and popped off the hands. Loosening two screws, he lifted free the movement—the assembly of springs, jewels, wheels and gears that keeps time—and detached the dial. The dial, made of porcelain fired on a copper disk, bore several hairline cracks that had filled with dirt. He placed it inside one of several mesh baskets, alongside other pieces he dismantled, in preparation for an ultrasonic bath.
When Arnold came to the watch’s balance wheel, he paused. The balance wheel is a watch’s primary timekeeping element, performing much the same function as a grandfather clock’s pendulum. It contains a coil, called a hairspring, whose oscillations regulate the release of power stored up when a watch is wound. A brass ring dotted with tiny brass knobs, the balance wheel resembles a ship’s wheel in miniature. When the watch is running, it rapidly spins one way, then the other, while the hairspring pulses in the middle, expanding and contracting.
The brass knobs circling the balance wheel are called timing screws, and they contribute small but significant amounts of mass. They can be added to slow down a watch if it’s running fast, or removed to speed it up if it’s running slow. They should be lined up symmetrically along the wheel’s circumference, but the ones in the Elgin pocket watch were asymmetrical, with two extra screws on one side.
In his repairs, Arnold often comes upon the handiwork of people he calls “impairmen”—folks who don’t really know what they’re doing, and leave pieces worse than they found them. He suspected that someone had slapped on the timing screws unevenly while trying to solve a separate problem. The result was an “out-of-poise condition”: an imbalanced balance wheel, unable to keep good time.
Once the case was buffed and the parts were clean, Arnold set about bringing the balance wheel back to poise. He added symmetrical screws, fitted the wheel back inside the movement and hooked it up to a timing machine, labeled “MULTIFUNCTION TIMEGRAPHER.” As the watch ticked, scattered dots appeared on the display screen in uneven bands. The timegrapher posted a reading: -449 s/d, nearly eight minutes slow per day.
Arnold extracted the wheel from the movement, removed some screws, and tried the timegrapher again. Now the watch was running as fast as it had been slow. He needed more mass. He reached into a drawer and took out an assortment of test tubes, plugged with cork, each containing a handful of miniscule washers. The tubes were labeled in minutes and seconds—the amount of time by which a pair of washers, once added to the balance wheel, would slow down the watch each day.
As Arnold fitted the washers, a plaintive meow came through the door. “Zeke! Hey buddy! Oh, my friend,” he said. It was snowing. His white cat, Zeke, padded into the shop, trailing wet paw prints. “You want a treat, don’t ya.” Zeke meowed. “I know, Zeke. I know.” He fished a bag of cat treats out of a drawer.
Washer by washer, Arnold slowed the balance wheel down to just under two minutes fast per day. But the timegrapher was recording another problem. The balance wheel was now swinging out of beat. He adjusted its orientation, but the problem persisted. “Most bench watchmakers hate antique watches for just this reason,” he said. “You’re always battling a hundred years of wear, and every pair of hands that the watch has been through.”
A couple of hours passed. Arnold spotted a few more flaws, and made innumerable tiny corrections, yet couldn’t get the timekeeping where he wanted. He knew there was a balance to strike between the value of the watch and the labor it would take to repair it completely. This Elgin wasn’t worth much more than $100. But then, he hated to do a job only part of the way.
Around 2 o’clock, he decided it was time for a break. He believed he had located the source of the trouble, but he had been working for nearly four hours—longer by far than it had ever taken him to set a watch in beat. He put the movement back in its polished case, behind the now-spotless dial, and set it on the table. Then he went into the fridge in the back of his shop and took out an IPA.
—
Arnold repaired his first timepiece in 1964—a brown mantel clock that still sits on a high shelf in his workshop, above a sign that says “Not For Sale.” He was 13 years old, and had no formal training. “But, frankly, that was my gift,” he told me. “I’m able to look at a mechanical device and see the way it’s supposed to work, even when it’s not working.” In the late 1960s, as the U.S. was escalating its troop presence in Vietnam, Arnold enlisted for alternative service as a conscientious objector. (“Jesus said that he who takes by the sword dies by the sword, and I believe he meant that,” he said. “You die spiritually in the act of picking it up.”) He was stationed at a hospital in Elgin, Ill., home to the Elgin National Watch Company, where he met an instructor from the watch college who took Arnold under his wing.
On March 12, 1968, a surveying team for the Atlantic Richfield Company discovered an oil field at Prudhoe Bay, on the Alaska North Slope. A consortium of oil companies began lobbying for permission to construct a trans-Alaskan pipeline, which Congress granted in 1973, in the midst of the Arab oil embargo. Arnold applied for a job on the line, and, after five months of waiting for his number to come up, he was hired. He worked in a labor camp for a year and a half, in nine-week stretches of consecutive 12- to 14-hour shifts, separated by two weeks of vacation.
The job was physically demanding—“working out in a ditch at 40 below,” he says, through months-long stretches without sunlight. But the food was good (“steak twice a week, prime rib once a week, fresh crab salads, oysters Rockefeller”), and so was the pay. “Every Tuesday or Wednesday I’d be asking myself, ‘What in the world am I doing here?’ And then on Friday they’d come and they’d hand me this paycheck, and I’d go, ‘Ohhh, yeah.’”
After his work on the pipeline, Arnold returned to Illinois, where he took a position at Craft Clocks and Gifts in Elmhurst, a Chicago suburb. “I bullshitted my way, literally, into the job as the repairman at the largest clock shop in Chicago,” he said. Though he had only ever repaired one clock, Arnold was a quick study, and, within six weeks, Craft had given him his first apprentice. Over the next several years, he hired and trained the company’s entire clock department, eventually overseeing an operation that installed upwards of 500 floor clocks each year. In 1981, he passed the national trade organization’s exam and became a certified master clockmaker.
Arnold has a white ponytail and moustache and creased blue eyes. In shop, he wears blue jeans, a work shirt buttoned at the wrists and, usually, a magnifying visor on his forehead. He lives with his wife, Sandy, in a house nearby on 4th Street, and the pair grow fruits and vegetables in an adjoining lot, including pears, plums, apricots, asparagus and a variety of berries. (They also keep bees, whose honey they promote and sell via a Facebook page, “Sweet Honey in ‘Da Hood.”) He speaks admiringly of things of quality: watches, of course, but also good whiskey, good wine, and good conversation. He once described the late Henry Fried, a preeminent American watchmaker and an acquaintance, as a “brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man.” Parting company, he says “blessings” by way of goodbye. Even on a day when he was feeling “crappy,” his expression tended to settle on a beatific grin.
In the early 1990s, after several years running a repair shop near Fayetteville, Arnold decided to become a minister. “I’d felt a call all my life, but I ran away from that call for a long time,” he said. He sold all of his equipment, got a bachelor’s degree (history, with a minor in philosophy) and enrolled at Wesley Theological Seminary, in Washington, D.C. Over the next decade, he served a number of churches, the last of which was Rockville United Methodist, off Linglestown Road. “He was a terrific pastor and a terrific person,” Joyce Ralph, a Rockville parishioner, told me. When Ralph’s mother died, Arnold, who had never met her, visited with her family and later gave a funeral service that “astounded” her friends and relatives. “They couldn’t believe he didn’t know her,” she said.
“I enjoyed ministering to the people, and I enjoyed worship,” Arnold told me. “But I am not an administrator. I’m too ADD.” Eventually, he realized he was “probably not the best person” to run a local church, and he resigned from Rockville in 2004. “My ex-wife of twenty years told me she couldn’t live with me anymore, and that’s when I decided it was time,” he said. In 2006, he bought a garage on Logan Street, converted it into a workshop, and returned to the business of clock and watch repair.
—
On a Wednesday night in the middle of winter, before going to bed, you set an alarm for 7:15 a.m. The alarm, on a clock radio, or more likely, a phone, rouses you the next morning in darkness. You shower and eat in time to catch an 8:07 bus, which deposits you at work just before 9:00 a.m. You swipe your digital time card, and the machine beeps to alert you it’s counting—counting the hours, for you and everyone else, as you turn time into money.
The tools we have to measure time, making it possible for time to condition our lives, are so ubiquitous and so reliable that we mostly take them for granted. What time is it? My computer knows, to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. How long did it take? My phone can tell me exactly. Yet our access to private timekeepers—and the idea, moreover, that these devices should be synched to an internationally accepted divvying-up of days—is a remarkably recent achievement.
The earliest clocks marshaled the steady “flow” of various natural processes. These could be more or less reliable, depending on the process involved. The Greeks, for example, used various kinds of water clock, or clepsydrae, to time public events like speeches and chariot races. An exhibit at the National Watch and Clock Museum, in Columbia, Penn., features a demonstration clepsydra based on a design from around the 2nd century B.C. It’s essentially a wide, heavy bowl with a tiny hole in the bottom which, when placed in a tub of water, fills up at a consistent rate. Or at least, relatively consistent. A plaque above the exhibit informs visitors that speechmakers occasionally added silt to their clepsydrae, slowing the water’s flow, a time-extending technique that gave rise to the phrase “Don’t muddy the water.”
Mechanical clocks, at least when they were first developed, some time in the 13th century, were hardly more dependable. The real significance of clocks that used gears, the historian David S. Landes argues in his book “Revolution in Time,” was that they incorporated an oscillatory motion—initially of a weighted bar, called a foliot, later of a pendulum—that lent them a back-and-forth, rhythmic quality, audible as a ticking sound. The mechanical clock, in other words, divided time into a succession of regular, countable beats. The “unknown genius who built the first mechanical clock,” Landes writes, “set time measurement on a new path and planted the seed of all subsequent improvements in chronometry.” As another plaque at the National Watch and Clock Museum puts it, “Time no longer flowed through a clepsydra—it ticked.”
Something whose beats could be counted could be made to beat more accurately, and after the invention of the mechanical clock, innumerable refinements followed. Yet in their quest for improvement, clockmakers faced an unrelenting enemy: the effects of time itself. Any machine that runs 24 hours a day will eventually wear out, lose accuracy, and break down. Landes relates the story of a cathedral clock in Cambrai, in northern France, requiring various repairs and several complete overhauls over the course of a century and a half. The cathedral’s records indicate continual maintenance, but nonetheless, an account from 1435 “brings the mention that the clock ‘was in great ruin.’”
“You’re searching for perfection, but perfection is unachievable,” Arnold said. “Any shortcut you take keeps you short of perfection. And so that’s probably the most demanding thing about the trade, is that you have to do it all the way.” One way to prevent wear in watches is through the placement of synthetic jewels, whose hardness prevents scratching and warping. “A watch with enough jewels will run for a looong time without wear,” Arnold said. But even then, the lubrication will eventually start to break down. Even high-priced luxury watches need to have their oil changed every three to five years.
“Give me the perfect oil,” Abraham Louis-Breguet, the great 18th-century horologist, is supposed to have said, “and I’ll build you the perfect watch.” There is no perfect oil, of course, and no perfect watch. But a nearly perfect watch may be a better symbol, conveying both human mastery and human limitations—our capacity to divide and measure the universe, and the universe’s ultimate indomitability. “O let not Time deceive you,” the poet W. H. Auden wrote. “You cannot conquer Time.”
—
My first conversation with Dave Arnold was not about clocks or watches. In early November, I called him about a letter he had written to the Patriot-News, about the effects of a trash-pickup fee hike on his business. City council had raised prices indiscriminately, and his shop, despite producing less waste than his home, was being charged at a commercial rate. “My annual cost to get rid of two trash cans a month,” he wrote, “is going to total $1,582.80! Do you have any idea how many watches I have to fix to pay for that?”
Arnold has the sort of independent streak you tend to associate with small business: one that demands dignity of labor, prizes quality over volume and speed, and reflexively stands up for the little guy. The privatization of Harrisburg’s sanitation services, a proposal that made headlines last fall, struck him as another iteration of the old capitalist lie. “What do we want?” he asked me. “More Walmart workers? Collecting food stamps and collecting Medicaid because they can’t make a decent living?” One time, describing his own religious outlook, he brought up Pope Francis: “He’s actually holding up what Jesus said, and trying to do what Jesus said to do. And he’s criticizing the economic system that keeps so many people in poverty and enriches a very few inordinately.”
This streak flared recently during a crisis within the American watchmaking community. In the early 2000s, a number of Swiss watch manufacturers began restricting the sale of parts to independent watchmakers. In 2005, Andre Fleury, a watchmaker based in California, sued Richemont, a luxury goods holding company, in federal court, charging that the company was employing monopolistic practices. The national trade organization, the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute, voted not to intervene, which angered many watchmakers, including Arnold, who felt the organization had failed to stand up for its members’ interests. To make matters worse, AWCI’s president at the time elected to intervene on his own; the court determined there was no conflict of interest, and treated him as an individual watchmaker. Ultimately, the case ended in a settlement that many watchmakers saw as favorable to the Swiss companies. Under the agreement, in order to gain access to Swiss parts, watchmakers now had to submit to an inspection, purchase certified equipment, and undergo new training, to the tune of several thousands of dollars.
“They caved utterly,” Arnold told me. “What is the point of having a national trade organization, if not to stand up for the independent watchmaker?” He had once served as a vice-president at AWCI, and written for its trade publication, “Horological Times.” But, this year, disgusted with the outcome of the litigation, he declined to renew his membership. (Jordan Ficklin, AWCI’s executive director, told me it was “the opinion of AWCI that parts should be readily available, but it is the reality that many brands choose not to sell them. We wish we had more influence, but we can’t dictate what industry will do.”)
Despite this, Arnold’s respect for Swiss craftsmanship is undiminished. Once, I brought in a New York Times watch-industry insert, a booklet of several glossy photos of fine Swiss watches. He paged through it, admiring the designs. “They do beautiful work!” he said. “There’s no question, they do beautiful work.”
Arnold has an abiding preoccupation with fairness, though his idea of fairness can so heavily favor his customers that it occasionally seems to defy good business sense. Once, a woman brought in an estimate she had gotten years ago from a factory service center for a wristwatch repair. Arnold glanced at the slip. “Outrageous!” he said. He quoted her a price—less than half the factory’s estimate, which had been made in 1996.
“I think that a workman deserves a fair wage,” he said, when I asked him about it later. “At the same time, some places charge a lot of money to get something fixed. And I don’t want to say that their work isn’t worth what they’re asking, because if they’re able to get it, obviously it’s worth what they’re asking. But I’m more comfortable sleeping well at night, knowing that I’m charging a fair price for the work that I do, and being able to smile and look the customer in the eye when they pick it up.”
Another time, a customer walked in with a watch that needed to be resized. In a matter of minutes, Arnold hammered out the pins and removed four links from the wristband. When the customer asked what he owed, Arnold told him not to worry about it.
“Geez, you can’t keep doing that,” the customer said.
“Yeah, I know,” Arnold replied.
The customer turned to me. “Every time I come over here, he says, ‘Ah, don’t worry about it.’”
After the man had left, Arnold clarified. “Usually I would charge something, but the neighbors here on the street I generally don’t charge, because they keep an eye on the place.” He’s known to replace watch batteries for neighborhood children for free. They only cost a few cents anyway, and then the kids will sit and talk with him. “Goodwill is worth a lot,” he said.
—
In January, I paid a visit to the Henri Stern Watch Agency, in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza. There, beyond a pair of tall glass doors, were the regional offices and service center of Patek Philippe, the luxury watch manufacturer headquartered in Geneva. Henri Stern moved into the suite last year, and the lobby still had a glossy, unlived-in quality. As I entered, a receptionist was speaking into a phone, alerting someone out of sight that there were customers “waiting in rooms one and three for assistance.” A moment later, a bald, broad-shouldered man in a semi-opaque white lab coat and white Crocs padded across the lobby and disappeared through a door in the opposite wall, which closed without making a sound.
A public relations manager, wearing a silk dress and knee-high black boots, gave me a brisk tour of the center. We visited a conference room with a view of the plaza’s skating rink, five stories below; an open-plan kitchen; and a number of offices with crystal doors. In a locker room, outside the service floor, we slipped cloth booties over our feet, to keep the room clear of stray particles. Inside, dispersed among several high tables, were watchmakers in lab coats, working quietly on watches. On a window sill, a machine like a series of bracelets mounted on poles rotated slowly, imitating the motion of the human wrist.
I was hoping to see—I don’t know what, exactly. Someone like Dave Arnold, I suppose, who would take down a bottle of Alaskan crude oil off a high shelf, or flip open an ancient case of washers in glass tubes, or show me the work of an impairman under a lens. But that was impossible: I was among the world’s most nearly perfect watches, which had little time for a novice. We passed a filing cabinet cabled to the ceiling, and a long, narrow drawer with miniscule parts in labeled cases, and then I was out the door. It seemed to be over in a few minutes, but I can’t be sure. Forgetting to check my phone, I had lost track of time.
Correction: An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the involvement of the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute in a recent lawsuit. The AWCI’s former president joined the lawsuit as an individual, not as a representative of AWCI.
