Famed
Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet made a beautiful and complex
watch for Marie Antoinette. The works were mostly gold, and its value is
hard to estimate not only because of its history, but because of its
workmanship. But Marie Antoinette never wore the watch that eventually
became known as the Queen.
The watch ultimately took
44 years to complete. In the interim, the French Revolution and the
resulting European upheaval led to the death of both the man who likely
commissioned the watch and its intended owner. (Marie Antoinette, of
course, fell under the guillotine. Seventeen years after her death, an
incensed crowd, convinced that von Fersen had conspired to assassinate
Sweden’s would-be king, beat him to death in a Stockholm square.)
Breguet died in September 1823. His son, a talented horologer in his own
right, finished the masterpiece in 1827. It traveled in the coat
pockets of a French nobleman and later ended up in the collection of Sir
David Lionel Salomons, a British polymath who brought the first car
shows to England and patented an idea for buoyant soap. Salomons left
his watch collection to his daughter Vera, a globe-trotting nurse who
settled in Jerusalem after World War I and later used her father’s money
to build the museum—and to house his collection of watches.
What
made Breguet’s work so significant was his skill as both a watchmaker
and a designer. His creations have pristine faces, delicate hands that
end in apple-shaped tips, and movements that appear as complex as a
computer circuit. The Queen was at once immensely complicated—it had all
the features of a cathedral clock in the space of a pocket watch—and
beguilingly elegant. Breguet even made a clear crystal face that allowed
the owner to see the movement of the gears underneath.
Skip
ahead to 1983, and the watch is stolen from the museum, along with
other valuable watches. The investigation led nowhere for 23 years. But
then, it gets really interesting again. Read the saga of the watch at
Wired.
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