Beautiful and obsolete: The wristwatch boom mystery
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PARIS — Charles Dupont bends with satisfaction over a watchmaker’s table where 78 minuscule cogs, wheels and springs lie in a neat display. It took an hour to unpick the mystery at the watch’s core. Now it’s time to put it back together.
Mobile phones may have elbowed out the humble wristwatch as the modern time-keeper of choice but the luxury end of the trade is booming, supported by an army of passionate watch-lovers and collectors from Paris to Shanghai.
Dupont, a 40-year-old computer technician, was one of dozens of aficionados who signed up for a watchmakers’ workshop at a luxury watch fair in the French capital last week — to get under the case of the coveted object.
“It’s all about the precision, how on earth they managed to make such ultra-precise mechanisms, even centuries ago,” said the Parisian, who used to take alarm clocks to bits as a child to peer at their intricate innards.
Organized by the Swiss-based Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, for the duration of the Belles Montres fair in Paris and once a month in Geneva, the workshops are fully booked until February..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101206com5.html
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