Looking backwards sometimes is looking forwards. Girard-Perregaux has been making watches for a long time. And they haven’t forgotten how it all started, either.
GP a company with a history, and this year, they are renovating the repository of that history, their museum. The Villa Marguerite holds tokens of the G-P company heritage, which stretches as far back as 1854, when, as they say, the first Girard married the first Perregaux. That was the birth of the brand name that is so familiar to horology fans, although it is interesting to note that the company can trace its roots even farther back, to 1791. La Chaux-de-Fonds is the traditional home of Girard-Perregaux, and in their time there they’ve come up with some memorable watches. And not all wristwatches, either; some say G-P can take credit for inventing the wristwatch, but their creations date back before that, to the pocket watches which were their awardwinning devices. The Villa Marguerite has long held its treasures under glass; come the re-opening, a new interactive display will greet the visitors, 
and among their new collections will be four of these remarkable timepieces. Although the pocket watch has passed out of fashion, at one time they were an indispensable part of a gentleman’s accoutrements. They were cherished, and displayed, and handed down from one generation to another. They endured, as the family endured, and the rise and fall of a family’s fortunes might well be linked to how wisely they minded their timepieces… and measured by whether they could afford a Girard-Perregaux watch. Four of these have survived down through the ages, and come to rest not really so very far from where their journeys began. But oh! The things they have seen! The stories they could tell! The past they represent!
Ah, the past. Without it, where would we be? We are slaves to the past even as we struggle to be free of it. Nostalgia is a trap, to be sure: as the New York sage put it, the good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems. It can be dangerous to romanticize the past, for it jades our eye to the future, or even the present. Like the character in El Filibusterismo who was always trumpeting the glory days of a Rome he never saw or even really understood, we can get caught up in the useless idealization of a past which, frankly, we probably wouldn’t have been equipped for anyway. How good a Roman centurion would you have made?
But the past is our only teacher, as well. Even in these times of more rapid change than ever, where the lessons of the past are frequently discarded as irrelevant to a world that seems not only new but virtually unrecognizable, the past is our first guidepost. Even if we only consider our own personal past as a viable guidepost, we still cannot ignore what has gone before. And who among us has not asked, in the darkest times, what would my father do?
So, sometimes, we do look backwards. Maybe to see what the people of yesterday did. Maybe to reflect on how we got to where we are. And sometimes, we reflect on those elements of the past that are no longer with us. Yesteryear’s tobacco pouches and jackknives, after all, will be echoed in today’s Blackberry and running shoe.
And the field of watchmaking and watch collecting is an unusual field in this regard: much of what was done before, is still done today. Not that the field itself has stood still (The watchmakers of long ago, I think, would positively drool over the tools available to them now. “Why, in my day, we had to make laser engravings using string and animal fat!”). But the very art itself is an embrace of a craft that was once essential, could now be seen as baroque, and many claim is as timeless as ever a thing could be. But the truth is, even in this specialized field, which hearkens back so much to the callings of the past, things have changed.
Once upon a time, they did watches differently. Carried in a pocket and attached to a chain; the elegant motion of checking the time and then snapping shut the case with a haughty click is now a thing only seen 
The blue spherical hairspring of the Girard-Perregaux pocketwatch seems fragile, but it has outlasted its owner, and may outlast us.in the movies. The chain itself sparked what would now be considered a secondary market. A watch chain, the fobs that attached to it and swung glitteringly from that metallic half-line across a man’s waistcoat… are they not, in their way, the ancestors of the trinkets some of us hang from our cell phones? And like the watches, they too would be handed down, from father to son, from generation to generation. A few of the watches that Girard-Perregaux crafted made this journey down through time. Four of them will be put into the new, very modern museum that G-P is building for them. Come look into the past.
The pocket watches that G-P is due to put into their collection are similar in many ways, but as you will see, each has its own special distinction. Although they have elements that all of them share, it is the little differences that make them unique which will stick in your mind, and should you ever make your way to the Girard-Perregaux quarters in La Chaux-de-Fonds, these timepieces will make it worth a visit.
The first is a yellow gold pocket chronometer from around 1860. It has the three parallel bridges that were so beloved of G-P, and it has a tourbillon as well as a detent escapement. The watch’s three parallel bridges have been enhanced with guilloche patterns. The Girard-Perregaux pocket watches open on either side, an interesting ancestor of the current crystal-sapphire backing in today’s watches that allows the owner to view the inner mechanism of the watch. There is actually a second hinged door in the rear, so the 
delicate movement is doubly protected. Remember, there is no crystal protecting this back: the second door, once opened, fully reveals the watch’s clockwork heart. So, care was needed. The inner cover was also delicately engraved, its script lettering still flowing cleanly across the gold after a hundred and fifty years. And the central inner bridge still carries the inscription of the maker across its metal face.
Another yellow gold pocket watch, this one from 1884, also bears the double-sided opening covers, and the second inner rear cover as well. However, unlike the distinctive triple bridge movement of the 1860 watch, this one carries a straight bridge movement. The escapement in this timepiece is a pallet form arrangement; an interesting touch is the spherical hairspring, coiled in blue among the gold, silver and gems. The hairspring is an accomplishment of the craft itself, a technical achievement that came down through the years to our eyes. The arrow bridge has been beveled, possibly to accommodate the gear wheels that spin just adjacent to it and on the same plane. The cut bimetal balance allows for continued precision even within temperature fluctuations. The absence of the triple bridge allows for a greater view of the exposed inner workings: although the paired gear wheels seem solid and sturdy, the delicacy of the hairspring and its surrounding works seem to be breathtakingly fragile, amazing in that such a thing could have been preserved over all this time. The gold cover, precious in itself, has kept intact a still greater treasure within its walls.
A pocket chronometer in yellow gold is signed “Girard & Co., London” and comes from around 1850. The clean, plain design of this mid-century pocket watch belies the complex movement within it. This watch too carries a blue, spherical hairspring, and here the complex arrangement is even more prominently featured. Perhaps appropriately, the London watch bears “English” bridges, and fusee and chain mechanisms. (A fusee and chain involved a cone-shaped pulley wrapped with a chain; the device was used to maintain regular timekeeping by evening out the irregular pressure from a mainspring as it wound down.) The escapement is once again detent. A point worth noting: we often tend to think of pocket watches as vertically symmetrical, with the crown at the 12 o’clock position as it depends from the chain. However, as with modern wristwatches, 
Long ago, Three Bridges made GP famous. They haven’t forgotten.the crown was placed at the 3 o’clock position, where the thumb of a righthanded viewer could push the button that opened the watch cover which then opened sideways, so the watch opened like a book. In this chronometer, too, we see that although the cover opened front and back, the covers did not open in the same direction; the back cover hinged at the bottom of the watch, at the 6 o’clock position, and thus the view into the watch’s case would have been from a different angle in back than from the front. I can only guess at the reasons for this arrangement of asymmetrical hinge placement, but I imagine that having the catch for the rear cover in a different position would have prevented any accidental disengagement of the wrong clasp. The positioning would have thus also retained a certain harmony, and, perhaps, the hinges would have been stronger for having their own individual anchorings. One of those questions to keep in mind if ever I’m in a position to resurrect a 19th century English watchmaker.
From 1878, we have an incredibly intricately decorated yellow gold pocket chronometer. This outstanding watch carries a tourbillon movement and detent escapement, and is unusual within because it does not carry G-P’s classic Three Bridges construction. But the inside of the watch is not what first stands out about it, although certainly its mechanisms are as good as anything else G-P produced. No, what grabs me is the minute and elaborate decorative scrollwork engravings that cover virtually every non-designated piece of this watch’s dial. Signed as a Girard-Perregaux, it has a face that looks as if it was designed for Spanish bullfighting nobility or Louis XVI. The gripped gold dial is apparently a good representative of pocket 
watches sold in South America, so maybe the bullfighting heritage guess wasn’t so wild after all. This is the kind of watch that you should use to make sure you’re on time for a duel with rapiers in a garden. And it should be at a fashionably lazy hour, as well. (I don’t hold with the whole pistols-at-dawn thing. Who the hell wants to have to wake up early to kill somebody?) Whatever violent uses you may have in mind for this watch, it’s a standout timepiece, and for me, it’s the pick of the litter. It is incredibly intricate, particularly in comparison with its 1850 companion chronometer, and I am interested to find that while I really can enjoy both equally, it’s this one that gets my blood going. Strict Puritanical influence or not, the 1878 watch reminds me that even though I tend towards the simple and clean watch dials, I do still have an appreciation for elaborate detailing for its own sake. The incredibly fine gold scrollwork needs no other reason than that it looks good. I don’t know, maybe one of my ancestors dated a bullfighter.
To wrap it up, an interesting addition to the museum at Ville Marguerite comes in the form of a replica. It’s the Modern Edition of the 1889 Tourbillon with three gold bridges.
Modern” in this case means around 1978, as you will see. The tourbillon with three gold bridges is arguably Girard- Perregaux’ most famous work. When it came out in 1889, it was a resounding success. How big a success? Well, it was released in 1889; it was of so accurate and solid a design, that in 1901, it was banned from competing in Observatory accuracy competitions, because it had won every single one of them for the previous twelve years. 
Like Michael Schumacher in F1, it was so good that eventually they had to alter the rules to make the competition less, ah, predictable. “All right! Messrs. Abelard, Bancroft and Curgemonde are in a deadlocked heat for second place! And, M’seiur G-P is over at the café sipping wine. They just give him the award when he walks in the door, these days.” I’m guessing twelve years of that probably broke a few hearts, so eventually they just said something to him.
Anyway, so: the 1889 Sous Trois Ponts d’Or. Big hit. Signature piece, and at the end of the 1970’s (back to modern times, now, or at least as modern as you consider the Disco era to actually be) Girard-Perregaux decided to create a sort of re-release. Twenty tourbillons, with the famous three gold bridges, were constructed, and were identical in every way to the originals. (Ironically, in hindsight, the 1970’s watchmakers drew up their designs by examining one of the original tourbillons which was, of all places, in the Ville Marguerite museum. Don’t you love how this all ties together?) And this was no small task, or rather, to be more accurate, it was a very small task. The watchmakers had to make incredibly minute watch parts that had been obsolete for years. Nobody knew how to do it anymore. They had to learn techniques that their fathers’ fathers had abandoned, and they had to revive methods that their own current methods had been evolved out of. And then they would have to revive the ancient methods to decorate the watch. They constructed twenty of these tourbillons; the first, Number #01, took 1,500 man-hours to create. It finally rolled out of the G-P Manufacture in December of 1982 (yes, the next decade) and it, too, is now set to become part of the Museum display. The Ville Marguerite, where, for Girard- Perregaux, everything begins and ends.