The Quartz Crises: The Battle That Redefined Luxury Timekeeping

9:33Tom Chamberlin:Pulsar Time Computer. Hamilton. Hamilton, yeah. I mean, this is one of the oldest watchmaking companies in the world. American. America was a huge market for cheap watches. And Hamilton was famous in the 19th century for making railway watches. The first LED watch, you remember the beginning of... what is it? Live and Let Die. It's Live and Let Die. And he's got the electronic watch that gives him the time. When you first see him, he's in bed with this woman. He's got the Palsar Time computer on his wrist. It was a huge, huge status symbol. Because, I mean, the Shah of Iran put himself down for one.

10:10Tom Chamberlin:Haile Selassie put himself down for one. I think the president, Ford, was seen testifying in the... Whatever it was about Nixon's pardon. He was seen wearing one. And it was the watch of the hour. And what's interesting is that there weren't... Things like the battery leaked sometimes. So at the factory, if you had a burned wrist, it was a mark of honour because you'd actually, at some stage, worn one of these great prototypes.

10:40Nick Foulkes:But this was having real world effects back in Switzerland because the watch industry... I mean, people were being laid off. Jobs were being really affected back in Switzerland.

10:49Tom Chamberlin:Well, I mean, again, it's not really a simple thing of old technology being sort of superseded. That's an element of it. The Bretton Woods Agreement came to an end in 1971 or something, I think.

11:01Nick Foulkes:Could you explain that just for...

11:03Tom Chamberlin:It was just the gold standard. So you had fixed exchange rates. So you had, you put me on the spot, I'm not an economist, but say you had a dollar was worth 4.2 francs, I think it was, or something at this time. All these things were kept. The dollar was the gold standard and it didn't float and these exchanges were fixed. But the war in Vietnam was costing so much he took it off that. Then it sank. The dollar went like a spanner down the lift shaft. So by the end of that year, I think the same dollar was buying you 1.5 Swiss francs, which meant that your watch was about three times more expensive.

11:36Tom Chamberlin:And also the gold prices at the end of... Don't forget the gold rush at the end of the 70s again. The prices, not unlike now, are going sky high. So that again was another thing to bear in mind for their costs.

11:48Nick Foulkes:But also the speed at which Seiko was growing, because by 1977, Seiko was the largest producer of watches by revenue. So it was$700 million on a production of 18 million watches. And so they were bringing in a huge amount of money. I mean, do you think people cared less about the prestige of owning a watch at the time? I mean, what was really pushing people to buy quartz rather than...

12:17Tom Chamberlin:Because it was new. And don't forget, it's like having white goods. You upgrade them from time to time. I mean, watches weren't so much of a thing as they are, which was great because I was buying old watches when I was a kid, just wearing them and I binned them and they stopped.

12:33Tom Chamberlin:No, I mean, I think it's slightly more difficult than that. I think it's that people wanted the latest thing, but also it became very rapidly the price tumbled. I mean, from being sort of, you know, there was one that was$5 ,000 or something. They tumbled. And then it became a race to the bottom, which is what favored those who had stuck with mechanical watchmaking, which wasn't very many. It became everyday technology because it'd be easily replicated. You didn't need to be sort of trained to do a sort of grand sonnery or something like that, you know, because you could just... Change the battery.

13:07Tom Chamberlin:Change the battery and you're done. So you actually have heel bars. instead of, so you have heel bars and watch repairs. Yeah, yeah. You know, which meaning watch repairs, meaning, could you mend my tourbillon for me, please? Yeah. And I don't think that's going to happen. In Piccadilly Circus. Yes, yes, yes. No, that guy's actually quite good. Yeah, he is good. He is the exception that proves the rule. Yes. And the guys in Westfield are very good as well. Yes, yes, I've heard that. Max uses them as his... As his go-to. As his after-sales service department. Yeah, very good.

13:33Nick Foulkes:Because I know that, certainly at the time, things like the synthesizer and, you know, just new, modern variants of old things. So obviously the synthesizer with the piano. And I just sort of wondered whether with that, everybody being kind of obsessed with new and sort of cutting edge, you know, sci-fi was becoming a whole new thing. You know, the 70s was when Marvel was coming out, superheroes.

13:58Tom Chamberlin:We were going to be living on the moon, don't you? Yeah. There was a song by The Three Degrees in the French Connection, the first one. There's three degrees of singing in a bar where the Popeye doll goes in. Yeah. And they're singing, everybody's going to live on the moon, everybody's going to go to the moon. And I mean, this was a real thing. I mean, serious people were predicting that we would be colonizing the moon.

14:20Nick Foulkes:Yes.

14:20Tom Chamberlin:And people believed that.

14:22Nick Foulkes:Yeah.

14:22Tom Chamberlin:And here we are sitting in the late 19th century, you and me. Not on the moon. Not on the moon. Not on the moon. Not on the moon is the last time I looked. So I think that there was a sort of faith in technology. I mean, there were such scientific advances being made that they were going to eradicate disease, for example. Yes. All disease. Yeah, which... Which didn't happen, unfortunately. No, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. So, I mean, there's a whole alternative future out there that we didn't take, do you know? No. I would hate to live on the moon, I have to say.

14:50Nick Foulkes:No, it doesn't look great. It's a long way to get to Boba Heff.

14:53Tom Chamberlin:But anyway, you're right. There was this expectation and it was a time when new was new. It was exciting. It was different. And then it became very commonplace very quickly. And what you had in both Rolex and Patek were bosses who were slightly different in their approaches. Heinegger felt that there would always be a market for, they would make the mechanical watch as good as they could because there would always be a market for it. Patek Philippe worked from the assumption that there would always be people wanting to buy expensive, collectible things. And they would make them. And they came up with both with two different calibers.

15:31Tom Chamberlin:Mechanical, everybody else was investing in quartz like crazy. Trying to beat the Americans and the Japanese at their own game. Which is just stupid because also the structure of the Swiss watch industry was such that you didn't have specialists. I mean, Rolex is a specialist, which is why it's a... So you had everybody offering everything. The ladies' watches. I mean, and they couldn't focus on one thing. So this, and they got picked off. This is why so many of them went out of business. But where was I with... Oh, yes, the Patek did the Calibre 240 in 1977, which was a beautiful planetary rotor automatic movement.

16:13Tom Chamberlin:It's a beautiful movement. It was still in use today, but it made the perpetual calendar launched in 1985. It's very important. It uses the 240 with a perpetual calendar module on top. Then Rolex did the 3000 series, which was a huge upgrade on the 1500 series. By 77, Heinegger was to say that he actually issued it uttered this wonderful thing, we're not selling a watch, we're selling a Rolex. That says it all. Because he had realized that, It was a gamble, but he had realized that a mechanical watch was an object that didn't necessarily have to fulfill its stated function of telling the time.

16:49Tom Chamberlin:It could be other things as well. And this is before sort of status conferring was a sort of dirty word. He realized this, and he made the watches to be as good as he possibly could in the basis that they could be also repaired. And, you know, they're very good on longevity. And that means keeping, you know, having something that's very easy to operate. So it's all about ease of access and stuff like that.

17:15Nick Foulkes:Yes.

17:16Tom Chamberlin:So they designed the movements like that.

17:18Nick Foulkes:But nevertheless, the expectation was that Japan was basically going to put the Swiss Wall Street out of business.

17:24Tom Chamberlin:Japan was going to eat the world at that time, if you remember. Yes, I do. You're too young to remember. But there was, the Japanese were, they were buying up all the luxury goods they could find in Paris. They were just buying the world and they were going to conquer the world. And even until the early 90s, there was a spate of films about the strength of the Japanese in the movie industry and things like that. And then suddenly they went into stagnation for a generation. So the Japanese were a really dominant force. There was much of a stereotype as the oil-rich Arab of the 70s. The Japanese are coming quickly.

18:01Tom Chamberlin:And they hired Japanese-speaking shop assistants and stuff like that. And they would bus them around to shop. and they treated Europe like a kind of, like a sort of shopping mall basically.

18:10Nick Foulkes:Yeah, I think what I'm trying to establish is a sense that there was a genuine jeopardy. A jeopardy, I think many people thought that it was over.

18:19Tom Chamberlin:Yes. I mean, you have a lost generation. People, I mean, there would be classes of one, two or three people. You know, there's a whole generation of watchmakers that basically don't exist. I mean, now that's very different. But I remember when I started writing about watches in the early 90s, or was it the 80s? I can't remember anyway, but maybe in the later 80s when you started.

18:38Nick Foulkes:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then, let's go with that.

18:40Tom Chamberlin:But then you still, I mean, then you still had, I mean, then if you just had an automatic movement in your watch, you were sort of king of the world. It's an Etta, 7750, that's been made by a kind of chimpanzee or something like that. So it's like being apprenticed to a coachwork builder for Horse and the Horse and Carriage, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you had very interesting people like Francois Paul-Jean, Frank Muller, who was, I mean, these slightly eccentric characters who had a real passion for F.P. Jean, its 18th century watchmaking. Same sort of route for Frank, actually.

19:10Tom Chamberlin:He was a restorer and repairer of old watches, and then he went on to become the master of complications. He was like the Richard Mille of his day. But they were the exceptions. But they were placed quite well when the pendulum swung back after a very long time. Their eccentricity suddenly became mainstream. They didn't move, it just tastes moved.

19:29Nick Foulkes:Well, also, this is probably a good time to bring in the person who kind of made the pendulum start to swing the other way, which was Nicholas Hayek.

19:40Tom Chamberlin:Nicholas Hayek, yes. He's a genius. I mean, he didn't care for me very much, but I can't...

19:47Nick Foulkes:That cannot be true. No, no, no.

19:49Tom Chamberlin:He would tell me, Mr. Fawkes, I'm better known than the president of Switzerland. People cross the road to shake my hand and congratulate me on me. And I said, that's wonderful, Mr. Hayek.

20:00Nick Foulkes:But we'll get to the end of this story and people might understand why. Because, I mean, he was brought in. He was a management consultant. He was a management consultant. And I mean, he was basically brought in because the Swiss watch industry, which had been massively backed by a lot of, there were at least five Swiss banks who basically just pile money into the...

20:21Tom Chamberlin:And also the dividends from watch companies were really high. OK, well, that explains a lot.

20:27Nick Foulkes:No, no, no.

20:27Tom Chamberlin:I mean, it was sort of, do you want to go in at 7 % or some people are getting 18%.

20:31Nick Foulkes:OK.

20:32Tom Chamberlin:So there was a lot of... There was impetus. But it's also a much broader thing than just, oh, it's the new technology coming in, and everybody else... It's much more nuanced than that.

20:43Nick Foulkes:OK, so Nicholas Hayek came in and his shtick was what exactly? I mean, why did they choose him to be the person to kind of...

20:55Tom Chamberlin:Well, I think he basically saved the industry. He amalgamated the industrial side and then the brand side. So it's not unlike the situation of Nirvana with cigars, is that you have the brands and you have the manufacturing. But it's not one size fits all, but it's separated.

21:11Nick Foulkes:But that was the same year that Citizen created the XSeed Gold, which was at the time the World's Thinness Watch. And then Seiko released a watch the same year, which was about as double as... Twice as thin, sorry. What's the one that I think Frank Sinatra wore and broke? That was the Delirium 4, which was 0.98 millimeters. Which, as you say, didn't last... But that, I think, remains the world's thinnest ever watch. Um... Yes. And so, try as Switzerland might, or the Swiss watch industry might, they were struggling to keep up with whatever. And any gauntlet they threw down, Japan was like, right, we're going to.

21:53Tom Chamberlin:This is what's interesting about Patek and Rolex. And that's why they are... There's a reason why they're Patek and Rolex today is that they decided that they weren't going to compete. Yeah. They started... I mean, it's a bit of a mixed metaphor, but they were playing a different game and they would choose the field upon which those battles were fought. So they said... No, they didn't say we'll let them have hyper-accuracy, but they were not in competition with them. Or not only insofar as you're going for that piece of human real estate you want to put on the wrist. You're competing for the man's wrist, but you're having a totally different proposition, not based on accuracy.

22:31Tom Chamberlin:Not based entirely on precision, rather. Okay.

22:36Nick Foulkes:So when Hayek was trying to conceive of the solution to this problem, he came up with this idea of the Delirium of Algari. It basically used plastic to keep costs low.

22:51Nick Foulkes:And the problem he had was that Tomco had gone to the bank so many times that they were like, we won't back you on this one. But Hayek then was like, you know what, I'm going to go speak to the bank and they'll back me. And they did. And then it was released, not as the Delirium Vulgari, but as the Swatch Watch. And so... This would be... 1983.

23:17Tom Chamberlin:What's interesting about that is they used the base plate, was the case back of the watch.

23:21Nick Foulkes:Yes, exactly. And so it was all an operation of trying to make the watch as sort of cost effective, I guess, as possible.

23:33Tom Chamberlin:And it was sort of an overnight success, wasn't it? Yeah, I mean, this watch is a phenomenon. That totally changed the market. There was a retro feel to many of them, but it was everywhere. Suddenly, it had sort of changed the game. And I mean, joking aside, he really was a genius. And he really did save... The low end had basically disappeared, but he saved a lot of the industrial capacity by doing things like that.

23:58Nick Foulkes:Well, that was the interesting thing, is that the Swiss watch industry, which is regarded today certainly as a kind of high-priced point industry, was preserved, I guess, by a low-cost item. I think that, you know, the emergence of the Swatch was, as you say, as a phenomenon, kind of started bringing the Swiss watch industry out of its sort of slump. But ultimately, the ingenuity of mechanical watchmaking needed to kind of be the proof of the pudding to keep it going. I think that would be interesting. Well, I mean, I think... They don't still survive off the back of Swatch watch.

24:34Tom Chamberlin:I mean, I think it was also the high end of it. If you look at Patek, for example, it was the Calibre 89. That was 1989. I think it was Max Studer was the director. He went to Philip Stern in 1980 and said, how are we going to celebrate the 150th anniversary? And instead of saying, I said, I'm going to suggest we make the biggest, most complicated pocket watch ever, which is basically a 19th century solution to a 20th century problem. And instead of telling him to fuck off out of his office, Phillips said, yes, go ahead and do it. And so he had this team of four people making effectively what was a sort of 19th century watch.

25:17Tom Chamberlin:And then it came out this grand, super, the most complicated watch in the world at the time. Then you see things like Blompin coming on with Beaver, for example.

25:24Nick Foulkes:Yes, Jean-Claude Beaver is also a very important part of this. He is.

25:26Tom Chamberlin:I mean, he's a very important man in many ways, not least in that he sort of got this intuitive sort of gift for seeing what... He sees stuff other people can't. So he bought the brand for 20 ,000 Swiss francs or something, I think, like that.

25:38Nick Foulkes:Because Blancpain is, in theory, the oldest of the brands. It's older than Vacheron Constantin. But it had a break, didn't it?

25:46Tom Chamberlin:It had a break. They all had a break, apart from Vacheron. I think Vacheron didn't...

25:49Nick Foulkes:Vacheron is the only one that continuously went on.

25:52Tom Chamberlin:I think so. That was owned by Sheikh Yamani at one point.

25:54Nick Foulkes:Wait, Vacheron or Blancpain?

25:55Tom Chamberlin:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. So, I mean, you've got also these other players coming in, like Akram OJ bought into TAG. It was Hoyer before, and then it became Technique Avant-Garde Hoyer.

26:07Nick Foulkes:Yeah. Let's go back to Beaver. Yeah. So what did he do that was particularly important for the revival of the industry?

26:15Tom Chamberlin:He bought Blancpain, which was a brand. I mean, it did the 50 Fathoms, which was a very good diving watch that was roughly co-evil with the Submariner. He was great friends, actually, with Jeannot, the marketing director at Rolex. But what Jean-Claude did was he made it into a brand of complications. So he did these six complications, the six sort of pillars of it, the six Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, you know, whatever. And then he made this... Because Blomper had been sleeping during the quartz era, or had fallen to sleep before the quartz era, he was able to say, there has never been a quartz Blampin and there never will be.

26:58Tom Chamberlin:And this was the sort of rallying cry. And he was amazing. He would take his... Awful. I mean, I wouldn't have wanted to work for him in those days. He took his team running at sort of five in the morning. And then he said, he said, Mr. Blampin came to me in a dream last night and told me I I had to do this minute repeater and things like that. Brilliant. And they bought, they found a picture in a flea market in Paris, in Clignancourt, I think it was. And they said, that's Mr. Blancpin. Bung him on the wall. I mean, he was brilliant. And the moon phases were very popular in the 80s. It was quite a nice little visual complication.

27:40Tom Chamberlin:And for some reason, they were popular. He couldn't afford gold, so he made them in steel. And so Marcus Margulies, who wanted to buy a gold version, said, I want it in gold. And he said, well, we can't do that. We don't have any gold. And he said, well, look, I'll advance you the money for 50 of these watches with the Moonface. And that's how he, I mean, he would go in a camper van to the Basel Watch Fair, as was, and operate there. He'd go and shower in the station. And then, I mean, so he was running it as a sort of, you know, it was a complete smoke and mirror show. The hustle was real. Yes, the hustle was real, but actually it was a real thing as well.

28:10Tom Chamberlin:I mean, Blampin was a contender in those days for, it was like a kind of mini version of Breguet, because Breguet at the time, when it was owned by the Showmere Brothers and then it was owned by Invescor, Breguet was, again, a proper, was sort of something you could actually put against Patek instead of, if you were a customer in a shop, you would actually maybe hum and har between the two.

28:33Nick Foulkes:Yeah, and then Jean-Claude Biver then would go on to... Jean-Claude Biver went on to... With Hublot and LVMH watches.

28:38Tom Chamberlin:Yes, but he went to, don't forget, he went to Omega for a while.

28:41Nick Foulkes:Yes.

28:42Tom Chamberlin:And he installed the James Bond franchise, making an Omega thing. They came to him offering him a certain sum of money for that and he said, I'll pay you more. And they said, what? And they said, well, but you give me more and you have more. I mean, there's that terrible line in one of the James Bond films, sort of, where she's, I think it's Eva Green says, oh, you know, you would wear an Omega, very nice, very classy.

29:07Nick Foulkes:She goes, you know, went to Eton and would wear expensive watches, Rolex. He goes, Omega. And she goes, beautiful.

29:15Tom Chamberlin:Yeah, isn't it? I think I was told that was spontaneous.

29:21Nick Foulkes:But where's quartz today in the market? Because I can't think of a specific industry, i.e. the Swiss watch industry, or another kind that has come so close to collapsing that has not only managed to revive itself, but then thrive. Because whilst you and I, we've always spoken about issues with kind of you know, revenue in, revenue out, or whatever. At the same time, the perception of the Swiss watch industry is extraordinarily high these days. People, in terms of aspiration and, you know, market value, how people perceive it, it's extraordinarily well-respected and very high. So I can't think of anyone else who's pulled that off.

30:02Tom Chamberlin:Not to that degree, although you could argue that some of the British car industry is still very desirable. They, Rolls-Royce, family. But it's not the same thing.

30:12Nick Foulkes:Yeah. But I would agree, actually.

30:16Tom Chamberlin:I mean, I think it is the most amazing Lazarus in Comeback, really. Yeah. It's something that I found myself... I mean, I wrote about watches because basically I liked them, you know. And then I sort of suddenly found that what I liked has swung into focus. And that was it, really. I mean, I just... Part of me is slightly annoyed that they became popular because I liked being a little eccentricity. Having it to yourself. But what the Quartz crisis enabled was a lot of people, we haven't talked about Alain Dominique Perrin, for example, it made a lot of people to buy these brands. So, Gino Macaluso at Giroir Perigo, for example, he was a lovely, lovely man, highly intelligent.

30:57Tom Chamberlin:He bought that company. I mean, I don't know what the exact financial arrangements were, but he bought that company and then ran it as a one-man band, sold it to Kering. But there were days, and there was Rolf Schneider was at Ulysse Nardin, he did the same thing. Talk about Perrin quickly. Perrin, the sort of inventor of modern luxury in my opinion, and one of the inventors of modern luxury. The Cartier, he did Les Mastes de Cartier, which were the sort of the swatch of Cartier, if you like, and it brought you in. He is a genius. And he was one of these people...

31:30Nick Foulkes:They're great watches, people still really want them. I know, I know. And the size of a postage stamp.

31:34Tom Chamberlin:Yeah, they're nice. They're nice. They're nice. I mean, they are a thing on their own, as well as being a cheaper version of a tank. They're a thing on their own. So, I mean, it opened up lots of opportunities for people to do things differently. So you had these entrepreneurs running, you could still in those days, you couldn't do it now because the sums of money involved would be too great, but you could buy a brand and you could sort of set it up. I mean, it's what happened with Breitling really. When the Schneiders got it, they got it and it was a closed, it was a shuttered factory. They restarted.

32:07Tom Chamberlin:As an individual, you could do things like that. Now you need the backing of a fund or something like that, because it's just, it's just the game is the, whatever, the, I don't play poker, is it the anti or something like that?

32:18Nick Foulkes:I'm not a player. Is there a backgammon analogy?

32:23Tom Chamberlin:Yeah, you've got a high double, you've got a double to 64 or something like that. And you've got 10 quid in your pocket. I mean, so you can't actually do what these guys did. And that was a very interesting, discrete period, I would say from around about 1990 to about 2000, when people could do this, they could buy things that were... and make them into a proper brand.

32:42Nick Foulkes:Yeah.

32:44Tom Chamberlin:And... Because also, Girob Perigot had been all quartz. Yeah, they... And they actually set the standard of VPH as well.

32:53Nick Foulkes:But do you think that if it wasn't these sort of conglomerates that were taking over, do you think they would end up having the budgets to create... Because I know that you'll try and avoid admitting to this, but I know that you get excited about a brand new style of minute repeater or, you know, those small details that, you know, watch fans are just really drawn to. And you love that. But a lot of the time, it's always a gamble to create things like that. And so do you think that by having these conglomerates, by having this sort of, you know, this sort of bureaucracy behind watchmakers, Do you think if they weren't there, watchmakers wouldn't have time to create and push the boundaries a bit?

33:35Tom Chamberlin:Well, I think you're right. I'm being deliberately romantic about these things. I think it has become a business and you need to apply business practices to it. My thing is that you have to balance that with what it is you're doing. And I mean, all these smart, young, clever marketing people say, we're not selling watches, we're selling a story. Well, of course he's selling a fucking story, but he's also selling watches. Yeah. And I mean, we all buy into this sort of thing that this is... It's almost abstract, all that stuff. The minute repeaters and the carry-ons and whatever it is. But I mean, yes, I still get very excited by that.

34:16Tom Chamberlin:And I think that those are kind of, I hate to say marketing exercises, but in a way they are because they are something, you know, you see that and then you'll buy that one because you've seen that one being a brilliant... I mean, Vacheron doing this very well. Patek did it already in 89 with the caliber 89. They did it again with the star caliber at the year 2000. So they've sort of done that. And now Vacheron is doing it with the Quête du Temps, whatever it's called.

34:44Nick Foulkes:By the way, I should just, for anyone watching, Nick is fluent at French, and so whenever he sort of pretends like he can't say the French word, he...

34:51Tom Chamberlin:Yeah, well, we gloss over my lack of linguistic facility with the language of Voltaire and Rousseau, and continue with...

34:57Nick Foulkes:You mean the Rousseau.

34:59Tom Chamberlin:...cockney slang. Yeah, I mean, no, they wouldn't. They wouldn't because they're lost leaders. But they are also... They're the watch industry at its most distilled, in that nobody needs it.

35:13Nick Foulkes:Yes, and I mean, brands like Van Cleef and Arpels are sort of, you know, still today really pushing the boat out for those sorts of things.

35:20Tom Chamberlin:Yeah, Van Cleef. Yeah. Yeah, Van Cleef do. I mean, what do you mean, Vacheron?

35:24Nick Foulkes:No, I'm saying Van Cleef do. I mean...

35:26Tom Chamberlin:Van Cleef is brilliant. Van Cleef do amazing. Van Cleef do amazing, amazing, amazing things. The birds on the birds on the... All of that stuff.

35:33Nick Foulkes:They are show-stopping. They are not for the wrist, but they are show-stopping.

35:37Tom Chamberlin:No, there was one for the wrist, which was... I felt very sorry for all the... I feel very sorry, because when Nicholas Boss was running it, you know, very hands-on, I felt sorry for the other watch brands, because the other watch brands didn't have the men tinkering away, making a sort of minute repeater, chronograph, split second, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, Moon phase accurate to 20 million years or whatever it is. And then he comes along with a gold watch shaped like a carp.

36:00Nick Foulkes:And then everybody just looks at that. Yeah, and then everybody kissing, kissing on a bench or something like that. It's sort of, you know, that means it's 12 o 'clock. Yeah. In Paris, there's kissing hours. I know, I know. It's marvelous.

36:10Tom Chamberlin:They're brilliant, but they are brilliant. They are horologically brilliant. Yes. Because they, and again, that is taking the, it's another way of taking the the story of the watch to another thing. It is a piece of entertainment. Yes. So look at this. You press a button and they kiss or you press a button and the bird flies away. It is amazing, that thing.

36:29Nick Foulkes:So I think where we can round things up is ultimately by saying that, you know, the court's crisis might have been scary, but we are delighted about the fact that they came out the other end because ultimately we are so enthralled by this world, which for a long time has not been about just telling time. It's about so much more. There's an artistry and an accomplishment that comes with it that we love.

36:55Tom Chamberlin:It's been protected by UNESCO, I think, as an intangible asset or something like that. And quite right, too. It has. I mean, it genuinely has. Protected.

37:04Nick Foulkes:If you were to get a quartz watch today, what would you have?

37:07Tom Chamberlin:Well, if I had to have anything, I'd have the Rolex, the Beta 21. Okay. But there is also... Denison are quite nice, I think, for example.

37:14Nick Foulkes:Yes, they are really nice. And a really good price point.

37:18Tom Chamberlin:Great price point. Individual looking thing. And it's got the aesthetic in it. But it's also, that's a watch where you don't need it to be, the mechanic, I mean, it's ironic because it's more accurate than the mechanical watch. But it's not about the machinery. It's about the look. And there it's quite happy. You know, it's like women's watches condescendingly used to be just battery operated. Because, of course, the makers were mainly men and they thought that women were incapable of operating a wristwatch. So they just slot the battery and off you go. And that is what the Denison is. You know, it's not pretending to be a kind of rugged, you know, go to great depth or go to great speed or anything like that.

37:59Tom Chamberlin:It's just a nice decorative watch. And in that case, the movement of the hand is almost irrelevant, you know. But it just, so I weirdly enough don't mind talking about quartz with that. But I still... I'm of that generation where still quartz is a bit of a dirty word, you know? Yeah, I mean... And for my son's generation, it's not. No. But the Rolex is a great thing.

38:23Nick Foulkes:Which we established very well in the Submariner episode. Yeah. And so I'm thrilled you're back. And thank you very much again for coming, hopefully, educating the listener in a particular period of time that they may not have known about. and may not have asked to know about. No, but I hope you make sense of my ramblings.

38:42Tom Chamberlin:It is fairly sort of, it's like a Virginia Woolf novel. Do you know what I mean? James Joyce. It's not James Joyce. I go for Virginia Woolf because it's even more scatty, you know.

38:53Nick Foulkes:But we are delighted to have you. Thank you, Nick. I remain Tom Chamberlain, and this has been The Luxury Dispatch, the podcast that tells you all the stories you didn't realize you wanted to know and answers all the questions you are yet to ask. Please do like, subscribe, and if you have any comments, we look forward to reading them. Agree? Disagree? Suggest other topics you'd like to hear us cover? No review will go unread. Thank you for listening.

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