Why don't more people know about the Bodmin-born horologist who helped put Britain — quite literally — on the map?
Robin Swithinbank remembers John Arnold on the 225th anniversary of his greatest creation.
I may be wrong, but I don’t feel lists of greatest Britons are drawn up as often as they once were. Mostly, they’ve been replaced by affections for the animal kingdom. I’m all for Eurasian curlews, but as a substitute for Sir Winston Churchill?
As it is, even when these rankings appear, the name of John Arnold (1736-1799) doesn’t tend to register. This despite the fact the Bodmin-born horologist was one of (and perhaps the most significant of) a group of 18th-century horologists who — quite literally — put Britain on the map.
The most famous was John Harrison, the autodidact whose marine chronometers solved the problem of measuring longitude and in doing so kickstarted a period of extraordinary naval dominance that spawned the British Empire (it probably did wonderful things for hedgehogs and barn owls, too, but we can’t be sure).
Harrison’s clocks and watches are now on display at Greenwich, where the meridian — 0° longitude — was established in 1851, 125 years after his death, ensuring world maps would forever centre on the British Isles.
'Somewhere along the line Arnold’s contribution has been all but lost'
John Arnold is one of the greatest and most innovative watchmakers of all time.
Harrison was a genius and deserved his recognition (as well as the £23,065 in prize money he received for his discovery, about £4.5 million today), but his clever contraptions were bulky — and expensive. It was Arnold’s to follow in his footsteps and continue his work, which he did by miniaturising Harrison’s mechanisms into pocket watches, making them more accurate, more portable and more affordable.
This mattered. Capt James Cook carried an Arnold chronometer on his explorations of the South Pacific, as did Dr David Livingstone during his missions to Africa, where he zealously campaigned against the slave trade. Both championed Arnold’s inventions.
Arnold’s horological achievements were so advanced that they still inform mechanical watchmaking today. But there was one factor that he and his fellow 18th-century watchmakers really struggled to contain, and that was gravity.
Pocket watches typically sat upright all day, in a single position. This meant gravity was always pulling on a mechanism’s moving parts in one direction, and over time, this disrupted its rate and, consequently, its accuracy.
Arnold would devote the latter years of his life to solving this problem and settled on a device that would house the ticking components of a mechanical watch movement inside a rotating cage. This, he reasoned, would offset the effects of gravity, because over the course of 60 seconds, these parts would spin through 360°.
But Arnold would die in 1799, before he completed his project. Anticipating his death, he left his ideas with his collaborator and great friend, the Swiss watchmaker and supplier of timepieces to Marie Antoinette, Abraham-Louis Breguet.
Breguet was a bona fide genius, too, and on June 26, 1801, he filed a patent for what he called a 'tourbillon'. He had lifted the term from Descartes’ philosophy, in which it described the universe, but it was also French for 'whirlwind', a poetic term for the manic rotations of the new device.
This year, Breguet is celebrating 225 years of an invention still lauded by watch collectors for its beauty and intricacy, even if the migration of watches from pockets to wrists has made its purpose all but redundant.
Suitably, the anniversary watches are gorgeous — albeit priced for collectors. Given the means, I could take either of the Marine Tourbillon Equation Marchante 5887 (£296,300) or the Tradition Tourbillon 7047 (£249,700), but even then, I’d keep half my money and opt for the achingly simple, deliciously symmetrical Classique Tourbillon 7357 in either platinum (£156,100) or a pale-but-warm yellow gold known as 'Breguet gold' (£142,000). They’re the purest expression of the Arnold-Breguet legacy.
These days, most high-end watchmakers have dabbled with the tourbillon. It will never be humdrum, but it’s worth noting that Breguet himself managed just 35 tourbillon watches before his death in 1829.
Somewhere along the line Arnold’s contribution has been all but lost, even while tourbillons appear in watches created by the recherché Swiss-based brand that now carries his name, Arnold & Son. History is swept up in Breguet’s tourbillon story, but — and let the record show it — every bit as much of the glory belongs to one of the greatest ever Britons.
