Signed Movements

On putting your name where nobody will ever lookInside a mechanical watch, on a small bridge of steel that holds the balance wheel, a watchmaker engraves a name. Sometimes it is the house. Sometimes, in the older tradition, it is a person, followed by the word fecit - he made it. The engraving sits under the dial, behind the case, in the dark, under a component that must be removed to be seen. The owner of the watch will almost certainly never look at it. The owner of the watch is not the audience. This is a strange thing to spend money on. The dial is where the marketing lives. The dial is what gets photographed, cropped square, and posted with a caption about heritage. The movement is the part that does the work and the part nobody sees, and it is therefore the natural home of every possible shortcut. Which is exactly why the good ones sign it. The corporate world has arrived at the opposite arrangement with impressive consistency. We have never had more surfaces for our names -…