American Made: The J. N. Shapiro “Resurgence”
Made In The USA – But Is It Art?
If there is a single watch that is responsible for my obsession with watches, it’s one that I ended up owning almost by accident. Many years ago at a flea market, I found a hundred-year-old American Waltham pocket watch in an old desk drawer, bought it for a song, and ended up fixing it. The rest, as they say, is history.
I found out in very short order that the modern mechanical watch world was dominated by one small, affluent, landlocked country in Europe. Switzerland – at least, thirty years ago – stood almost unchallenged as the world center of mechanical horology (although there were interesting things going on in Japan and Germany). I knew, though, from that first pocket watch, that America had once had its own watch industry, and a massively productive one at that, which at one point was producing millions of watches a year at a price and with a quality Switzerland could not dream of matching. By the time I got the watch bug, the American watch industry was long gone and despite the richness of the modern watch landscape, I had a persistent nagging dissatisfaction with the fact that there wasn’t any American watchmaking.
Made In The USA?
I wasn’t alone. The idea of an American Made watch – or at least, a watch made by an American-owned company – was and is a powerful one and to varying degrees, is part of the identity of companies as diverse as Fossil, Timex, Weiss, Shinola, and at the hand-made high-end, RGM. “Made in America” is, however, more than just an elastic concept of ownership or manufacturing provenance. It is defined, and very strictly defined, by the Federal Trade Commission – for a product to call itself “Made in America” – or, to be precise, “Made in USA” as the FTC puts it – it must be all, or “virtually all” made in the United States, and any foreign-made parts must “make up a negligible portion of the product’s total manufacturing costs” and are required to be “insignificant parts of the final product.”
The definition is much more restrictive than “Swiss Made” and, to make things even more challenging, the FTC will not pre-approve a “Made in the USA” claim – the onus is on the manufacturer to have a solid base for the claim before making it in public about its products.
J. N. Shapiro Watches
Joshua Shapiro, an educator by trade and training (with degrees in American history) founded the J. N. Shapiro watch company in 2018. He had begun by making engine-turned dials for other brands, and in 2018 he launched his first watch under his own name – the Infinity series. The Infinity watches were an astonishing debut – extremely intricate engine turned dials were combined with no-holds-barred haute horlogerie movements made by Uhren Werke Dresden, a company owned by Marco Lang, of Lang & Heyne. The combination was a compelling one and the Infinity watches were very well received by the enthusiast community in general and of course, raised the question of what might be next. On the basis of the quality of the Infinity watches, Shapiro – in his own quiet, methodical way – seemed to be after very big game.
Shapiro’s background in American history seems to have informed his obsession with making a watch which would be, as much as possible, made in the USA both de jure and de facto. (His long-standing interest in the subject was on display at his lecture on “The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of American Watchmaking” at the Horological Society of New York, last January). The basic problem Shapiro faced was that unlike Switzerland, which had and has an industrial base for watchmaking in the form of a complex web of third party suppliers that serve the Swiss watch industry, the United States has few if any manufacturers capable of supplying watch components, and so anyone who wants to make a Made in the USA watch has to more or less start from scratch. This is not an enormous challenge for static components like bridges and mainplates, but critical components like escapements, jewels, and balance springs present a nearly insurmountable challenge.
The Resurgence Watches
Earlier this year, Shapiro debuted a watch that showed just how thoroughly he had attacked the problem. The Resurgence watches aimed to be nothing less than the most Made in USA watches possible. Shapiro aimed to be as transparent as possible about where the components came from and where both manufacturing and assembly took place.
When the Resurgence was announced, Shapiro said that of the 180 components in the prototype watches, 148 were made in the United States – exceptions included the movement jewels, and the balance springs (flat springs purchased from Precision Engineering AG in Switzerland, with overcoils hand-formed in the USA). During the prototyping process, Shapiro was able to find suppliers for both balance spring wire and jeweled bearings in the United States, which will be used in the production watches.
The Resurgence watches are time-only watches with movements running at 18,000 vph – the classic pocket watch frequency – in 19 jewels, with a 40 hour power reserve; the caliber is 30mm x 4mm with hacking seconds. There are three basic movement configurations, for now just designated A, B, and C. A is a full bridge movement with an S-shaped bridge for the center wheel, third wheel, and fourth wheel; B has separate cocks for the third, fourth, and escape wheels (with a very traditional-looking bridge for the ratchet wheel, mainspring barrel, and center wheel) and the C is the most unusual, with sharp right angles on the bridge for the mainspring barrel.
Movements are damascened in the manner of classic American pocket watch movements and to my eye, the A design is the most attractive as it reminds me irresistibly of classic American railroad grade pocket watch movements, like the Hamilton 950E or the Howard railroad chronometers, but each of the designs has its own particular appeal. C for instance, is the most distinctive in terms of setting itself apart from standard bridgework and B gives you the best view of the wheel train, which in the Shapiro Resurgence is worth looking at – train wheels are in 14k gold, with rounded spokes (generally spokes for train wheels are simple flat shapes, or in higher end watches, beveled).
Quality And Provenance
There are two basic questions to ask with the Resurgence watches – which, by the way, are priced exactly where you would expect very high grade, hand-finished watches from a small-batch independent watchmaker to be in the current market; prices start at $70,000 for steel or zirconium cases and for standard models – if you can speak of such a thing with this sort of watch – top out at $85,000 for white or rose gold cases, with an $80,000 tantalum option as well (Shapiro offered the Infinity watch with a tantalum case as well, which I believe was the first tantalum case used for a non-Swiss watch, unless Grand Seiko or Lange slipped one in there that I’m forgetting).
The first question is, do the watches measure up qualitatively? As far as I can tell without having seen one in person, there is no reason to think that J. N. Shapiro’s Resurgence watch is not, in terms of quality in finishing and execution, up to the same level as the best hand-finished time-only watches coming out of Switzerland, Germany, or Japan right now. Depending on points of comparison, if you were to put, say, Movement A next to a Dufour Simplicity or a Rexhep Rexhepi Chronomètre Contemporain, you might find places where the Resurgence suffers by comparison but I suspect you’d have to work at it. And I don’t trust pictures to draw any conclusions about qualitative comparisons anyway – at this level, it’s all about 10x loupe and be there (to paraphrase what the photographer Weegee said about f8 and news photography).
The second question is, how much does it matter for a watch to be Made in USA? That is much more nebulous and it depends on who you are. The price of the Resurgence, it seems to me, represents two things. One of them is the inherent labor-intensiveness and craft involved (even the case is an elaborate piece of work, with an intricate barleycorn pattern on the case band and separately machined lugs held on by screws).
The other is the value of Made in the USA, which means both the intangible emotional value, as well as the actual cost of American skilled manual labor. On the second point, making watches this way means highly trained hands and moreover, a strong sense of design and aesthetics on the part of everyone working on them, and in a world where such skills get rarer every day thanks to the greatly decreased cost of simulating hand-work by machine, this is is going to cost J. N. Shapiro, which means it’s going to cost you.
On the first point, I can only speak for myself when I say that this sort of obsessive thoroughness in making a watch in America, as completely as possible with American skilled artisans and American components, is extremely exciting. It is of course also completely irrational. Watchmaking nowadays is more international than it has ever been and you could say (and I’m sure some people will) that where a watch is made is much less important than its intrinsic watchmaking content.
I think however, that provenance is in fact more important than ever before and precisely because luxury watchmaking is becoming more and more homogenous by the minute. An analogy is the experience of luxury shopping in any major tourist destination on Earth – it doesn’t matter where you go, you are going to see the same brands in the very similar stores with nearly identical products and nearly identical interior design, whether you are in Paris or New York or Tokyo or wherever. And Made in USA for watches is an extremely difficult standard to meet – which means that it’s not just some marketing abstraction, it represents an enormous commitment in time, energy, effort, and above all, conviction.
Of course, there is a world of difference between the sort of massive, manufacturing at scale that was done at Waltham, or Elgin, or Hamilton (and a few others) in the late 19th and 20th centuries. That particular Everest is one which at least for now, no one wants to scale (partly because if you want to build an industrial base to compete with entry level automatics from Miyota or Sellita, you’re going to be trying to go into an extremely capital intensive, low margin business with very high barriers to entry against established players against which you stand an excellent chance of failing to compete). But in terms of making a fine, hand-finished, high end watch, the Resurgence is an incredible manifestation of patient determination and a very clear notion of the goal. It’s worth remembering as well that the Resurgence represents a kind of watchmaking that was never really a part of the American landscape; we excelled at making watches which were, as Antoine Norbert de Patek wrote after visiting the US for the first time, were, “reliable, accurate, and above all, cheap.”
The Resurgence is indeed part of the American watchmaking renaissance. But it’s also something that the great American watch companies of the past would never have dreamed of – watchmaking as an expression of personal vision as well as a particular place, rising to the level of art.
All photos, Atom Moore. Find out more about the Resurgence at J. N. Shapiro Watches.