Series 2

Roger Smith is the only person George Daniels trusted enough to teach. He entered Daniels' workshop on the Isle of Man in 1998 and became his apprentice, learning the traditional English method of watchmaking that Daniels had revived from Breguet's era. When Daniels died in 2011, Smith inherited the responsibility of continuing the co-axial escapement in its purest form. He works alone on the Isle of Man, building approximately ten watches per year entirely by hand.

The Series 2 launched in 2006 as Smith's first wristwatch designed and built entirely in-house using what he calls the Daniels Method. The movement contains 225 parts, every one of them finished by hand. Smith made a critical improvement to the co-axial escapement: he combined Daniels' original two-wheel system into a single wheel, guaranteeing concentricity and angular orientation between the teeth and arbor. The result is an escapement that performs better than Daniels' original design, built by the one person Daniels authorized to modify it.

The case is 38mm or 40mm in 18K gold. The dial displays hours, minutes, seconds, and a power reserve indicator. The movement finishing is classical English: frosted gilt plates, gold chatons holding the ruby jewels, and hand-flamed blued screws that show a deep blue-purple from the traditional heat-bluing process. Every screw is hand-flamed individually over an alcohol lamp. The color comes from controlled oxidation at specific temperatures. It is a technique that takes years to master because the window between the correct blue and ruined brown is seconds.

Ten watches per year. One man. Isle of Man. Every component made in-house except the hairspring. The waitlist is measured in years, not months. Smith does not advertise. He does not need to. The work markets itself through the small community of collectors and watchmakers who understand what hand-finished English watchmaking means.

I put Dufour, Daniels, and Smith together in this collection because they represent a lineage. Daniels revived the methods of Breguet. He taught Smith. Dufour worked independently in the Vallee de Joux but pursued the same ideal of total handcraft. Together, they represent the argument that the highest form of watchmaking is not industrial production, no matter how refined, but the work of a single pair of hands applied to every surface of a mechanical object. That argument is getting harder to sustain as the last generation of craftsmen capable of this work ages. Smith is the youngest of the three and he is the future of this tradition. When he stops, it may stop with him.