Engineering

Two Waltham WWII broadarrow-marked military watches posing with Leica IIIa, ca. 1938

I am a sucker for proper engineering. I like nothing more than a good mechanical watch or a properly designed and built camera. Some years ago I picked up an old Zenith pocket watch with a broken glass crystal and non-functioning movement for a tenner at a local charity shop. I hung on to it in that sorry condition for several years, before chancing on a proper, old-fashioned watchmaker in Shropshire, who seemed to be exactly the right man for the task of setting the little beauty to rights, so I posted him the watch and waited.

The Zenith is only cased in rolled-gold, but the gold's of good thickness, and while dented, the case shows none of the base metal. It has a beautiful, plain white enamel face with lovely blued-steel Breguet hands.

We were due to go down to Shropshire for a couple of weeks, so I rang the watchmaker and said I pick it up in person. He told me it had been an absolute joy to work on, and that I was welcome to visit his workshop. The finished result is with me still: my original intention was to sell it on - pocket watches of this type aren't particularly valuable but it's still worth a few hundred quid. But I kept it for its beauty and it's one of the only watch movements I've got that my compromised hearing can actually perceive properly - that sound is the pure poetry of proper mechanical motion.

On the subject of cameras, I've mentioned before a few of the old film cameras I have, but the purest expression of engineering quality and elegance of focussed purpose is embodied in the oldest. Pre-war and German. Eighty-two years old and still doing exactly what it was designed to do, with a solidity and precision that is seldom seen these days outside of, well, German and Swiss engineering.

Which takes me back to my days at Birmingham University and working in the Mechanical Engineering photographic department. One of the great benefits of working there was that there were practically no boundaries between the various disciplines or between the academic and technical staff; you could pretty much wander at will and talk on peer terms with almost all. My favourite lunchtime meander was to go and drink in the technological and engineering wonders of the Metrology Dept. They measured stuff. Very, very, accurately. The kit they used was exquisitely made, and apart from Japanese optics from Nikon and Olympus, almost exclusively German and Swiss. For gear geeks, this stuff has no compare outside of CERN.

It's the singularity of purpose that a well-engineered machine or tool brings to bear on the work at hand that always impresses - generalism is fine in its place, but you wouldn't want to hammer in a nail with a Leica, nor could you take a photograph with an Estwing hammer.

Specify accurately, design well and manufacture precisely. The fundamental principles of engineering.