When in 1951 the family moved to the Adirondacks of northern New York State, it was to a house filled with oddments, among them a number of clocks. Clocks are wonderful because they embody many technologies essential to modern industry. I busied myself with trying to make them go. This activity was not popular, for the clocks struck the hours. The mechanisms were straightforward. I learned to adjust rate by lengthening or shortening the pendulum.

I knew that just inside the door to the principal’s office (dignified, ponderous T. Walsh McQuillan) of my school was a tall, wall-mounted pendulum clock. My reading told me this was a Synchonome master clock, controlling all the slave dials in the many classrooms, invented in the late 19th century.

A later birthday present was a copy of “Britten’s Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers.” This was wonderful because it opened the subject of watches whose oscillators were not pendulums but instead, a balance wheel, spinning this way and that against the restoring force of a slender and graceful spiral spring. The wheel carried means of allowing a mechanism to advance an escape wheel by one of its strangely-shaped teeth. It was geared to rotate the minute and hour hands. A wound spring or raised weight supplied torque to drive this mechanism for some 30 hours, tick-tock. Those sounds were made as the balance wheel unlocked, through a lever, the escape wheel, one tooth at a time. The unlocking allowed the gentle torque of the escape wheel to give the balance wheel the tiny impulses that caused its motion to continue

France became the center of watchmaking, but owing to religious persecution, many makers and technicians, being Huguenots, fled to England beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, taking their advanced understanding of physics and technologies with them. Among them was Denis Papin, who first showed the utility of a piston-and-cylinder in extracting energy from gas pressure. This utility continues to this day in all internal combustion piston engines, passed on through Newcomen, Watt, and the many others who used it in devising and perfecting steam power.

Technological diffusion.

It was noticed that the rate at which a watch ran varied ever so slightly depending upon in which position it rested overnight or in its watch pocket – face up, face down, stem up or down, stem right or left, six positions. Practitioners became adept at altering the curvature of the outer end of the balance spring, as a means of reducing the six positional rate errors (“adjusted – six positions” said the promo material).

In 1801 Louis-Abraham Breguet decided to have done with such approximations. He devised the “tourbillon,” a means of rotating the whole escape mechanism through 360 degrees every minute. This concept remains in production under his name and others at prices from $30,000 to ten or more times that. Watches that take this extreme further by rotating the escape mechanism around more than one axis have a special appeal.
The point being that England, by receiving the Huguenot watchmakers, greatly benefited, as the techniques and physical understandings they brought accelerated that nation’s industrial revolution – and rapid rise to worldwide power.

Early watches wore out quickly. The answer to that was to make bearings and escapement surfaces of super-hard mineral material—the “jewels” whose number (17, 21, 23) greatly extended the life of the mechanism.



As I’m typing this, POP, into my mind sprang the impatience of Honda engineers on the NSR500 GP program. Must connecting-rod big-end caged needle roller bearings always be the Achilles heel of two-stroke engine reliability? In the early 1950s, the cranks of some high-revving Italian 125 cc GP engines had to be changed after every weekend, or even every day. Through Yamaha’s TD/TZ two-stroke racing decades, a crank would tie up at 900 miles or so, but cranks were cheap so they were changed at 400 miles by those whose budgets permitted.

Honda eventually decided to eliminate gambling winning results against the reliability stats of tool steel needle rollers. They adopted “jewels” just as had the long-ago (1704) French watchmakers working in England. Honda’s jewels were gleaming dark silicon nitride needle rollers, installed at close to zero clearance to avoid destructive clicking.

Such ceramic rollers began to be used in turbochargers in the late 1980s. A common number of rollers in a two-stroke big-end is 14. “Jeweled movement – fourteen jewels.”