Winding Up a Legacy: George Daniels and the Exquisite Art of the Escapement
A story of how George Daniels’ innovative approach to watchmaking and his pioneering work on the escapement ignited a passion for the intricate craft of watchmaking and inspired a new appreciation for the art of horology.
When diving into the world of horology, one will come across many of the same names, the forefathers of modern watches, the men who paved the way, invented processes, dial configurations, case shapes, movements, and complications that allowed us to have a vast array of timepieces today. You will see names like Mudge, Breguet, Roy, Hooke, Tompion, Graham, Earnshaw, Lepine, and Harrison, but there is one which I find the most fascinating.
George Daniels stands in rarefied air, revered by many and considered one of the most influential figures behind Abraham-Louis Breguet. However, for me, he was just another part of watch history, someone to know, someone to study, but I never got overly excited about a conversation on Daniels. The man made 37 watches in his lifetime and yes they are pretty incredible, (He did create the “Daniels Method” in which one watchmaker makes the entire watch) but he was hardly someone that made my teeth chatter with excitement.
However, this did not stop me from purchasing his book Watchmaking. And it was this reading of his seminal work that formed in me a deeper appreciation for his work and especially the escapement.
Some Background
When writing about watches you have the ability to learn and study a myriad of trades and topics. Horology has everything I could hope to write about. To quote famed watch writer Joe Thompson, “This beat had everything: a 500-year-old consumer product that was an object of both art and science, a global market, national industries in the throes of technological change, high stakes and high drama, with a cast of remarkable characters fighting ferociously on the marketing and technology fronts. To paraphrase the great Wordsworth, writing about another revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be a young watch reporter was very heaven!”
I love everything about watches, but it had always been the nuanced mechanics that eluded my intimate understanding.
My foray into the drug that is understanding escapements began when I was looking over at my stack of horological books during a story conference with Jack. He asked, “Does anything stand out to you from the Daniels book?” I thought about it, looked away from my computer camera rummaging through my brain and eventually replied, “To me it is learning about the escapement. I always knew what it was, but when he broke it down, the evolution of the escapement, I think I look at watches differently now, but I can’t really put a finger on it.”
As a watch collector and enthusiast, you know the parts of a watch that you are drawn to. For example I love watch hands, in the future I hope to get Breguet hands tattooed on me, but that is a conversation for another day. But moreover, I have always been smitten with the sound of ticking, reminiscent of my musician father’s metronomes.
That synonymous tick, tock that you hear is so normalized that it goes by in a fleeting instant. It is everywhere from our wrists, to our walls, to our cars, to tv. All around us, where there is a clock there is a tick and there is a tock.
There are a few sounds that my children will never know. Sounds that represent technology from the past. The soft hum of radio static, the click of a rotary phone, the wretched screech from your dial up internet connection, the ding of a typewriter as it reaches the end of a page, the white noise of a tube tv suffering from a bad cable connection, the blood-curdling noise chalk makes as it catches an edge on a blackboard, the switching of slides on a projector, the sound of a VHS tape finishing rewinding. You get the point.
But by god, I will declare that my children will always know the ticking sound of a mechanical clock.
And the reason all watches and clocks make this sound is because of a little mechanism called the escapement. And it was Daniels who taught me to love this little marvel.
Every part of a watch is important but none of them matter without the escapement. You can have a watch without a dial, without hands, even some without a crown… but you will never have a watch without an escapement.
There are few things in life that have been around for 300+ years and have barely evolved. Hell, there are few things that have been around for 50 years and haven’t evolved. But the escapement is one of them. Outside of Daniels co-axial (which we will address shortly), the escapement has remained essentially untouched. I hate the old cliche of if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but this is the very definition of that.
A Very Brief History of the Escapement
The very first escapement is debated, but generally it can be attributed to Su Song who in 1088 A.D. was commissioned by the Emperor of China to create the world’s finest water clock. When completed it was 40 feet tall and was powered by a 11 ft diameter water wheel that had 36 buckets around its rim. It worked as you would imagine, as one bucket filled to a certain point it would trip the mechanism, the buckets would rotate and a new one started to fill. According to Rebecca Struthers in The Hands of Time, “Su Song’s pioneering piece of engineering… represents the very first escapement.” By definition the escapement is a “mechanism that alternately checks and releases the power of the gear wheels giving the clock the potential for an indefinite duration.”
I have read countless metaphors and analogies regarding watch escapements. I’ve read about escapements being compared to the dam on a river or the conductor of an orchestra. And these are valiant attempts but to me the simplest explanation is not done through a metaphor. The escapement in principle is quite straightforward. You have a store of power wrapped up in the mainspring and you need to release that power but not all at once. The mechanism that releases the power at periodic intervals is your escapement.
In Watchmaking, Daniels explains the characteristics of an “ideal escapement.” A watch escapement should have minimal friction and ideally require no oil, should be self starting, should give impulse to the balance at equilibrium, have good safety so a shock does not unlock it, and finally, interfere as little as possible with the natural motion of the balance.
These are a lot of requirements and they present quite a challenge for any watchmaker. To quote Jack Forster, “Escapement design is something horologists have been fiddling with for 500 or so years, but while many are called, few are chosen, and the timeline of horology is littered with the sad, silent, inert corpses of escapements which enjoyed, as it were, a brief moment in the sun before fading and falling with all the poignant finality of a cherry blossom (oh, chaff-cutter escapement, we hardly knew ye).”
Verge Escapement
The earliest known mechanical escapement, the verge escapement, marked a significant milestone in the evolution of timekeeping sometime during the 13th century. Before its invention, water clocks were the primary time-keeping devices. The verge escapement operates on a frictional rest principle, where the escape wheel remains in constant contact with the oscillating balance wheel. However, this design had a major drawback: the gear train would periodically reverse direction as the balance oscillated, leading to excessive wear and compromised accuracy. Interestingly, the verge escapement predated the development of the hairspring, although later iterations of the verge escapement incorporated a hairspring, resulting in improved precision.
The Cylinder Escapement
Thomas Tompion’s 1695 invention of the cylinder escapement marked a significant breakthrough in horology, later refined by George Graham. A crucial advancement over the verge escapement was the elimination of the gear train’s reverse motion. However, the cylinder escapement still operated on a frictional rest principle. This leads to excessive wear. English clockmakers mitigated this by crafting cylinders from ruby, enhancing durability but introducing a new vulnerability to shock. This was due to the balance wheel being entirely supported by the ruby cylinder. The ingenious Breguet addressed this by repositioning the ruby cylinder, ensuring it no longer bore the weight of the balance wheel. This innovative arrangement was successfully implemented in a significant portion of Breguet’s timepieces, leaving a lasting impact on horological history.
The Lever Escapement
The lever escapement, tracing its roots to Thomas Mudge’s 1755 innovation, has been a cornerstone of horology for nearly three centuries. Its versatility is evident in various configurations, such as the side-lever design found in tourbillons, where ruby pallets align radially with the balance center. Despite its evolution, the fundamental principles remain unchanged.
The lever escapement delivers impulses in both directions, is self-starting, and boasts excellent safety features. The precise interaction between the ruby pallets, escape wheel teeth, and the lever’s shaft ensures reliable locking and unlocking, making it resistant to accidental dislodging.
This robust design has contributed to the widespread accuracy and precision we take for granted in modern horology.
However, despite being the most popular escapement in watches, the lever escapement uses sliding friction, which requires lubrication. Oil, even the best oils break down over time and will impact the timekeeping accuracy.
The Detent Escapement
To maximize precision in a timepiece, the balance wheel should be allowed to oscillate freely, without interference. The detent escapement embodies this principle, boosting accuracy by only briefly contacting the balance wheel to transmit an impulse from the escape wheel. However, this design has limitations. It is sensitive to shocks, which can cause it to halt, and it lacks self-starting capabilities. Essentially, the escape wheel is only held in place by the detent spring, and that spring, which as the kids say today, is weak AF. These drawbacks make it less suitable for wristwatches, where reliability and robustness are essential. Nevertheless, detent escapements found a niche in marine chronometers, where their high accuracy was prized for navigation.
(Side-note: Then you have someone like Raul Pages, the winner of this year’s Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives, with his pivoted Detent Escapement in the RP1. You can read more about his innovation here).
Co-Axial and Daniels
However, this now brings us to George Daniels and the Co-axial escapement.
George Daniels’ co-axial escapement invented in 1974 and patented in 1980, is the only successful mass-produced escapement innovation since the lever escapement. By eliminating the need for lubrication and reducing friction, the co-axial design increased accuracy and reduced maintenance. Daniels’ work revolutionized escapement design, and his book Watchmaking dedicated 14% of its pages to the escapement, a testament to its significance.
The co-axial was an attempt by Daniels to combine the advantages of both the lever and detent escapement while eliminating the disadvantages which include (sliding friction requiring lubrication, poor safety, not self-starting, and impulse in only one direction).
In the simplest terms a co-axial has two wheels: the escape wheel and the co-axial wheel. Co-axial just means both wheels are on the same axis. The escape wheel turns in a circle, releasing a tooth at a time to move the watch’s hands. The co-axial wheel is stacked on top of the escape wheel, rotating at the same speed.
The larger of the two wheels gives impulse directly to the balance, the smaller wheel gives impulse to the balance indirectly, via the lever. As that impulse is delivered directly to the balance by the larger escape wheel in one direction, but indirectly, via the lever, in the other.
As the escape wheel turns, its teeth alternately lock and unlock with the co-axial wheel’s teeth. This locking and unlocking action allows the watch’s balance wheel to oscillate (swing back and forth) at a precise rate. The co-axial design eliminates the need for lubrication, reducing friction and wear.
In short, the co-axial escapement is a clever system that ensures a smooth and precise transfer of energy, allowing the watch to keep accurate time.
In an interview Daniels explains his innovation in more detail. “The difference between [the lever escapement] and the co-axial escapement lies in the method of imparting the energy replenishment to the oscillator. The oscillator must have a small amount of energy fed into it at every oscillation in order to… maintain the oscillation and produce the time. One could explain it by saying that the impulse to the oscillator, the energy given to the oscillator in the lever escapement is done through an enormous long sliding friction action.”
He continued to say, “So we might say that, for example, in the lever watch the sliding action is given to the components by the wheel here, which as it goes you see it pushes up this half there, pushes it up and that energizes the oscillator. Whereas with the co-axial escapement, the action is more like pushing open a door when the two components, instead of sliding, just gently push each other open without almost no friction… with almost no friction.”
Looking Forward
Since the co-axial, I can’t say that escapements stopped evolving but mass produced and successful innovations are far and few. Grand Seiko has their High-Beat Dual Impulse Escapement. Ulysse Nardin has their Anchor Escapement. There is the Zenith Oscillator in the Zenith Defy, De Bethunes Resonique, Vaucher’s Genenquand and my personal favorite Girard-Perregaux’s Constant Escapement.
GP’s Constant Escapement, in contrast to traditional Swiss lever escapements, which experience a gradual decline in amplitude over time, the Constant Escapement maintains a consistent beat rate regardless of the remaining power in the barrels. This innovative mechanism eliminates the irregularities and inconsistencies characteristic of traditional escapements, where the watch starts strong but gradually loses steam, resulting in unreliable timekeeping.
The GP Constant Escapement achieves this through a design that integrates a silicon blade, just 1/6 the thickness of a human hair (14-microns-thick), directly into the escapement. This blade stores energy up to a precise threshold before releasing it instantaneously, ensuring a consistent and precise transmission of power to the balance wheel, and revolutionizing the fundamental mechanics of timekeeping.
Falling In Love With Watches Again
It is easy to become jaded in our world of constant change and obsessive need to innovate and evolve, but what Daniels taught me, in a very surprising manner through his writing on escapements and the inventing of his co-axial, was that if you are to know any part of a watch, if you are to call yourself someone with know-how and a little modern marvel moxy, you’ve got to understand the escapement.
Philosophically to think about a man who looked at 300 years of stagnation and to have the hubris to say, “I will be the person to usher us into a new era of timekeeping” is just wild. And Daniels did just that.
The escapement is the un-sung hero of watches. The grinder on the team. The friend who is never in a picture but always at the party. And to understand the escapement, its history, its innovations is to, well at least in my opinion, truly begin to enter a new sphere of collecting, a new understanding of horology.
Knowing what makes your watch say “tick, tock,” is in the words of Jack Forster, “a sign of horological maturity” and we all have George Daniels to thank for that.