History

Gianmarco Nicoletti, Ulysse Nardin’s Italian brand manager and a history enthusiast (he graduated from the University of Eastern Piedmont with the famous Professor Alessandro Barbero), takes us on a tour of discovery of one of the oldest and most famous brands in watchmaking, which has always been synonymous with innovation and technical avant-garde.

I admit, many times I was wrong. At the beginning of my sales career and before I started to understand a few things, I said many inaccuracies. It is quite normal, mechanical watchmaking is a very complex field; one has to study or at least read about mechanics, general and specific history, a little physics, metallurgy, know the origins of companies and many other subjects. The more we know, the less monotonous we will be in presenting a product, the more correct in describing what a watch is. I don’t want to be difficult, but becoming a trained salesperson takes many years. When I started in 1990, there was no Internet, no magazines, few companies, unlike today, organized training courses. One of the inaccuracies that I dragged around the most was calling the tourbillon an escapement. It is not an escapement. After investment, if there is a term that is definitely overused in watchmaking today, it is tourbillon. This word follows me, harasses me, I find it often around a bit like the advertising that, by now, bombards all our senses. Pardon the outburst but, perhaps because of age issues, I find myself a little impatient with those topics that are too much debated but, little explored. In addition to being a professional, fortunately for me, I have also become an enthusiast and this allows me to better understand why this device fascinates, impresses, intrigues, and provokes debates. There is an obvious fascination in watching the rotation of a tourbillon more, much more, than any other movement that takes place in a mechanical watch and it is no accident that, in recent years, the device is almost always visible through an opening in the dial. A bit of history.

There are rich and interesting years for historians, and years in which few but noteworthy events happen. In the year I want to tell you about, few but important things happened.   Stalin dies, the war in Korea ends, biologists Watson and Crick discover the double helix structure of DNA. Elvis Presley records his first record, New Zealander Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tenzing Nogary climb Everest. Well, does that seem little?   But in the world of watchmaking, you may ask? A lot happens.   It is precisely the ascent of the world’s highest mountain that offers interesting topics. Hilary and Norgay both climb with a watch on their wrists, which was also an important instrument for determining the duration of the oxygen cylinder, an error in the calculation could cost them their lives, as at the time it was believed that it was impossible to climb more than 8000 metres without one.

In 1585, Tommaso Garzoni, a religious belonging to the order of the Lateran Canons, had one of his most important works published under the title: La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, which would be reprinted and translated for almost a century. A very fortunate work and an example then for many. It is a pity that our Tommaso (sometimes Tomaso) died in 1589 and did not enjoy the success. An encyclopaedic, endless work, it deals with all professions, trades, human activities. From princes and lords to clergymen, from jurisconsults to agozzini, agucchiaruoli, arcari, boii, curadestri, from duellists to cunning, heretics and, of course, inquisitors, from dream interpreters to logicians, magicians, backbiters, prostitutes, cops, spies, usurers. In short, think of any human activity and here you will find a description, up to 540 entries. Yes you read that right.

I don’t know what you think of the watchmaking profession. There are those who admire it unconditionally and, on the contrary, those who consider it just another profession. The evolution of the figure of the watchmaker technician is long and fascinating and I reserve the right to do a special article on it. Today there is much more information and many people know that a good watchmaker is a person who has done specific studies, who has had to do a lot of ‘gavetta’ and, if he or she proves to have the necessary requisites, will finally be able to devote himself or herself to the objects we so admire. As in all fields, there are technicians, good technicians, great technicians and, fortunately for us, great talents. Those who solve, reinvent, create, in short, always raise the ‘bar’.

Religions have accompanied man and his history practically since time immemorial. There is no known culture, large or small, that has not developed its own faith, its own thinking, its own feeling that there is something sacred beyond reality, beyond life. One or more “superior” Entities to look to, to ask, to make supplications to, to receive inspiration, illumination, revelations. It is therefore obvious that religion has traversed, and sometimes conditioned, the history of the measurement of time much more than one might think.

Would you like to have as a friend a person who, having inherited from his father a considerable love of studies, becomes one of the greatest experts in astronomy, philosophy and medicine? Who is highly esteemed by the most talented scholars in Italy, Germany and Hungary? Who is appointed personal physician to Charles IV of Bohemia, who teaches medicine and astronomy in Padua, medicine in Florence and then again in Padua and who, despite these commitments, is also a great traveller, mainly to teach but also to treat powerful people and to be a negotiator on behalf of the municipality of Padua?

It is always difficult to put oneself in other people’s shoes. If we don’t know the other person, it’s almost impossible. Imagine if the person whose shoes I would like to “step into” lived in the early 1300s. No, I haven’t gone mad, it’s just that as a great lover of the history of watchmaking, I’d love to know what people who were very different from me thought, how they lived, what they knew, and how they reacted to new things.