Determining a Horologist's Ability

From Horology magazine, September 1937

Determining a Horologist's Ability

THE FOLLOWING letter from a subscriber offers a practical solution to a problem which has been a source of worry to every jeweler employing a horologist.

Editor HOROLOGY,
Dear Sir:
Although I am not a watchmaker but the proprietor of a jewelry store, I have been a subscriber to and reader of HOROLOGY for the past three years, and through your columns have learned to realize that it is impossible for an employer or store owner to determine the quality of work done by the watchmaker by mere observation.

For years the store owner has been accepting repaired watches from the watchmaker and delivering them to his customers without any means of checking the work done, with the result that in many instances the store owner is made the innocent victim of the customers' ire, as well as loss of patronage and long established friendships through the carelessness or incompetence of the workman intrusted with the work.

However, the various articles published in HOROLOGY on the testing of watches by the watch rate recorder suggest that this method could be successfully employed at the time of hiring a watchmaker and for the testing of new and repaired watches.

Purchasing new watches is a gamble, a certain percentage being found out of order, both before and after a sale has been made, necessitating the watches being sent to the repair department to be put in order at the expense of the sales department.

The watch rate recorder, as I now see it, offers a solution to the employers' problems bv requiring the watchmaker to furnish a printed watch rate recorder certificate with each watch repaired. This would require a higher standard of workmanship resulting in increased wages for the competent workman, and eventual elimination of the incompetent and uneducated worker who is non-progressive, and is usually a threat and a menace to his emplover and a destroyer of harmony in his craft.

The equipment of a central testing station in each of the large cities where watches could be tested at very small cost offers a fair and equitable means of securing high grade work and at the same time protecting the employer and jeweler against unscrupulous dictatorship which he now faces through intimidation and coercion.

In conclusion, I suggest that representatives of well known jewelry stores, members of the executive boards of the horological Associations, heads of wholesale material houses and trade shops meet and freely and conscientiously discuss the problems now confronting the watchmaking craft.

Respectfully yours,

Jeweler