Hands of Time: A Watchmaker's History

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Hands of Time puts them into cultural and historical context, combines that with the story of Rebecca's singular career, and assembles the parts against a backdrop of the whole history of time.

Struthers brings her unique perspective as artisan and engineer to explore both the evolution of mechanisms and the complicated ways in which timekeeping has changed human life: the more we measure this intangible cosmic property, the more precious it becomes. Struthers skims the wavetops of the profession with short stories, from mankind's earliest attempts to track our rotation around the sun and then catalogs some of the major evolutions in technology and progress. Struthers then brings us through the golden age of watchmaking in the 1700s and 1800s, and details the major innovations of that time period. A really fascinating look at history focusing on time in general and the advancements in watchmaking and how this changed the way we work over the years since the first town clocks.

Full of tales of royal intrigue and social history, it charts the story of watchmaking through the centuries and reflects on how time affects us all. There were also color images of famous timepieces, including Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s pocket watch that accompanied him on the ill-fated 𝘛𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘢 𝘕𝘰𝘷𝘢 expedition to the South Pole. As impeccably crafted and precisely engineered as any of the watches on which the author has worked so lovingly over the years, this book is a joy to behold and a wonder to enjoy.

Taking us from the earliest lunar calendar (a notched baboon fibula found in the Lebombo mountains) to today's quartz watches. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.Unfortunately, Rebecca often drifts off course into politics, economics, and sociology, wherein her talents clearly do not lay. How the measurement of time has been used to save lives, proclaim love, exploit workers, explore the world, fight wars, symbolise wealth, and sustain economies. Struthers gives a history of watchmakers, and a description of what drew Struthers to watches, and not clocks. D. in horology) Rebecca Struthers takes us on her personal journey to becoming a watchmaker, intertwined with a brief history of watchmaking and timekeeping around the world.

One of the first entrepreneurs who saw the broader potential of wristwatches was Hans Wilsdorf, the founder of Rolex. An award-winning watchmaker--one of the few practicing the art in the world today--chronicles the invention of time through the centuries-long story of one of mankind's most profound technological achievements: the watch.Each chapter of her exquisitely crafted history explores a pivotal moment in watchmaking from the past 500 years. As well as beautifully enhancing the text, Craig Struthers’ wonderful drawings serve to provide yet another personal touch from this amazing husband-and-wife team.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Harper for an advance copy on this book about time, what we make of it, how we tell it, and what our knowledge of time tells about about us.

Her style elevated the book from merely informative to profoundly beautiful, prompting me to reflect on the intricate devices that accompany us, and their wearers and makers, in all their imperfect humanity, through time. If you imagine the former but much longer and written by the latter, you'd have a fair idea of how this book reads. She cleverly intertwines her and her husband's experience of becoming independent watchmakers in Great Britain with horological topics as well as some of the challenges they face in their craft. There were some details of watch mechanisms that went over my head and I thought that the last chapter on how Struthers approaches watch repair did not close out the book well.