Swiss Watching Read online

  Absinthe

  There can be few other drinks with a reputation like absinthe, also known as the Green Fairy. This highly potent spirit (up to 72 per cent alcohol) is made from wormwood and green anise and played a starring role in late nineteenth-century culture, particularly at the Moulin Rouge. It was first made in 1792 in Couvet, Canton Neuchâtel, by a Dr Pierre Ordinaire, who touted it round as an extraordinary all-purpose remedy.3 At least that’s how the story goes. What’s certain is that once Pernod Fils started mass production in France, there was no going back. Until absinthe was banned, at least. A Swiss referendum in 1908 changed the constitution to ban the drink,4 with France and the US following suit, though it was never prohibited in Britain. The Swiss ban was overturned in 2005 and absinthe was once again available in its homeland.5

  The division sign

  Two dots bisected by a line. It’s such an everyday symbol, pressed by millions of fingers using calculators, that it’s hard to imagine anyone inventing it. The ÷, or obelus to give it its technical name, was first used by Johann Heinrich Rahn in his text Teutsche Algebra, published in Zurich in 1659.6 Funnily enough, it doesn’t appear anywhere on a normal computer keyboard; you have to use / instead. Rahn is also credited with inventing ? to mean ‘therefore’ in algebra.

  LSD

  In November 1938, Albert Hofmann was a mild-mannered Basel chemist working at Sandoz Laboratories, now part of pharmaceutical giant Novartis. He was researching rye fungi to find a cure for migraine, but accidentally discovered LSD, though it took him five years to realise its mind-bending qualities. LSD, or acid to its friends, then became the drug of the hippie era before it was made illegal. Its full English name is lysergic acid diethylamide, but LSD is actually (in typical Swiss fashion) an abbreviation of the original German, Lysergsäurediäthylamid. The formula is an equally uncomfortable mouthful, C20H25N30, but with all those Cs and Hs it looks very Swiss. Herr Hofmann died in 2008, aged 102,7 so dropping a bit of acid clearly never did him any harm.

  Stock cubes

  Real chefs may hate them, though even they must use them, but most of us couldn’t cook without a stock cube. And for that we have to thank one Julius Maggi, a half-Swiss, half-Italian man from Frauenfeld, who created the first Bouillonwürfel. These days you can get any variety you fancy, be that fish or porcini mushroom, but the original bouillon cube was made from beef. The Swiss Maggi cube (1908)8 pre-dates the ones from both Oxo (Britain, 1910)9 and Knorr (Germany, 1912).10 Maggi, now part of Nestlé, is one of Europe’s biggest brands and probably best known for its dried soups, also something it invented.

  Cellophane

  If you think plastic food wrapping is a modern creation, think again. It also dates back to 1908, when Dr Jacques Brandenberger from Zurich came up with a cellulose-based transparent film, which he called cellophane.11 By 1912 he’d perfected both the product and the process, but initially cellophane was used mainly for the eye-goggle part of gas masks during the First World War.12 It then found its true calling as the perfect food packaging, still its main use today, as any trip to the supermarket will prove. Best of all, because it’s made from cellulose (the fibrous part of most plants) it’s totally biodegradable.13 As if inventing one food covering wasn’t enough, the Swiss went and did it again two years later...

  Aluminium foil

  Tin foil, as we normally still call it in English, used to be made of tin. Then a Swiss company, Dr Lauber, Neher & Cie., Emmishofen,14 worked out how to make it from aluminium and in 1910 opened the first aluminium foil rolling facility, in Kreuzlingen just near Constance. Chocolate bars and leftovers were never the same again. Personally, I still miss the foil that used to cover a Kit Kat. Running a nail between the chocolate fingers was almost as satisfying as eating them afterwards. How ironic, then, that it was a Swiss company, Nestlé, which ditched the foil and switched to plastic after buying Rowntree.

  Electric toothbrush

  The Swiss love looking after their teeth; most seem to spend a small fortune on their mouths. So it’s no wonder that a Geneva man came up with the world’s first electric toothbrush. Back in 1954, Dr Philippe-Guy Woog helped the cause of dental care by creating an oscillating, motorised toothbrush.15 Called the Broxodent, it was an immediate success despite not being battery operated – you had to clean your teeth while plugged in. Trust the Swiss to come up with not one but two inventions to help in the battle for hygiene, though only the most fastidious cleaner would use them together...

  Toilet duck

  Cleaning the loo isn’t the nicest job, but at least it’s easier since the advent of the toilet duck. On 18 June 1980, Walter Düring created his first WC-Ente (as it’s called in German) in his factory in Dällikon, near Zurich.16 At that time, the family business was famous in Switzerland for Durgol, a decalcifying liquid invented by Walter’s mother. Her son’s gadget would give the company a worldwide brand. Anyone who has to clean the loo has been thankful ever since, especially if someone has just thrown up after being forced to listen to another type of duck...

  The Birdie Song

  Originally called Der Ententanz (or duck dance), this ridiculous dance-along song was composed in 1963 by a Swiss waiter called Werner Thomas.17 It began life as a sort of polka played on an accordion in an après-ski club at Davos and just kept on going. Its high point came in the early 1980s when the absurdly popular ‘La Danse des Canards’ in France and ‘The Birdie Song’ in Britain stormed the charts. In total, there have been 370 versions in 42 countries selling over 40 million copies.18 Some duck, some dance, as Churchill might have said, though I’m sure he would never have flapped his arms on the dance floor. In 2000 it was voted the most annoying song of all time, beating other classics such as ‘Teletubbies’ and ‘Barbie Girl’.19 My vote would have gone to fourth-placed ‘Agadoo’.

  Forget ‘The Birdie Song’, what about the cuckoo clock? Where’s that in this list of great Swiss inventions, I hear you ask. Visit almost any souvenir shop in Switzerland and a whole array of these carved wooden wall clocks will be on display, so you could be forgiven for thinking they are a national treasure. In fact, they’re just a money-spinner and the Swiss never turn away a tourist franc. The customer is always right, even if they’re buying something which originated in southern Germany. Take a trip to the delightfully named Furtwangen in the Black Forest and you’ll learn all about the real origins of the cuckoo clock. Perhaps Orson Welles should have gone there before he added the famous line in the film The Third Man where his character Harry Lime disparages Switzerland for having 500 years of democracy and peace only to come up with the cuckoo clock.

  With the notable exception of that clock, Switzerland is justifiably renowned for its timepieces. And for its timekeeping. Is it just a coincidence that the most punctual nation on earth also makes some of the best watches? Maybe not.

  A CLOCKWORK COUNTRY

  Time is important in Switzerland. The clichés about personal punctuality and the country running like clockwork are true to a degree. I do have Swiss friends who are habitually late, the trains don’t always run exactly to the second, and not everyone wears a watch. But they are the exceptions in a country where tardiness is generally regarded as a deadly sin and opening times are followed to the number. Almost every Swiss person has a Handy, or mobile phone, but they still manage to be on time for meetings, dates and outings. But how do the Swiss define being ‘on time’? For many it actually means a fraction early, as timing it to the second is hard even for the Swiss; for most it means within five minutes of an arranged time.20 Few wait longer than 15 minutes before giving up and leaving. Better never than late, it seems.

  When it comes to timekeeping, almost everything in Switzerland seems to be run with military precision, including the cinemas. Films nearly always start on the hour or half-hour, sometimes on the quarter but never at annoying times like twenty past or five to. And most still have an interval, which comes exactly halfway through the film, no matter if that’s in the middle of a scene o
r even a line of dialogue. It may be timed to perfection, but the interval is nearly always badly timed as far as the viewer is concerned. Nevertheless, the Swiss seem to like the intrusion, using the wee break not just for that but to buy the overpriced popcorn, sweets and drinks which make the pause worthwhile for the cinemas. Just like everywhere else, time is money in Switzerland.

  With everybody tacitly agreeing to the same rules, the easiest way to confuse Swiss people is to bring a measure of doubt into any question of time. English-style dinner invitations of the formal ‘6.30 for 7’ or informal ‘come about 7ish’ will not be understood because they are not clear. In the first case most of your guests will turn up at 6.34, in the second at 7.02. When it comes to time, flexibility is rarely an option.

  Take this scenario: it’s a national holiday, so everyone is off work. It’s 34°C in the shade and the riverside open-air baths in Bern city centre are like Brighton beach, with barely a blade of grass to be seen between the towels and bodies. Good business for the café with a long summer evening ahead and hundreds of people spending money on food and drink. But what happens? Exactly at 6 p.m. everyone is kicked out. It’s a holiday, so closing time is earlier than normal. Never mind that countless people are there, or that it’s the hottest day of the year, or that it’s just plain mean. Closing times are there to be followed. The only people grumbling were foreigners; the Swiss all left without complaint because to them it was clear that if closing time is 6 p.m., then that’s when it is. It dawned on me then that there’s something more important to the Swiss than money: time. Combine the two, and you have the Swiss idea of heaven, or the watchmaking industry as it’s known to the outside world.

  WATCHING THE CLOCKS

  Think of the ultimate in Swiss quality and precision, and you’ll more than likely be thinking of a watch. Watchmaking is the Swissest of Swiss industries, and one of the country’s success stories. While many of the companies involved are small, watches are big business overall. In 2010 the Swiss exported 26.1 million timepieces, which is tiny when compared to China, the world’s largest exporter (671 million watches).21 The Swiss concentrate on quality over quantity, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the prices: the average export price of a Chinese watch is $2, a Swiss one $558; no wonder the Swiss watch industry is worth $15.5 billion in exports alone.22

  And it’s all Calvin’s fault. In his quest to make Geneva the perfect puritan city, he banned jewellery in 1541, so forcing craftsmen to turn to a new trade: watches.23 It turned out so well for them that 60 years later they formed the world’s first Watchmakers’ Guild.24 A century on, they had become so successful that Geneva just wasn’t large enough for all of them and many took to the hills to set up shop in the lower reaches of the Jura mountains. Some of the most famous names in Swiss watchmaking are to be found in the region along the French border: Omega and Swatch in Biel/Bienne, Tag Heuer in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Zenith and Tissot in Le Locle. No wonder the towns involved like to make the most of their connection to the industry; together they are now known as Watch Valley. It’s the perfect place to go for a crash course in all things horological, starting in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the spiritual home of Swiss watchmaking (see the map of Romandie on page 184).

  Just a few kilometres from the French border, this is the city that in its nineteenth-century heyday was famous for its craftsmen and their watches, cementing the Swiss reputation for masterpieces. La Chaux-de-Fonds is also a prime example of ‘modern’ town planning. Burned to the ground in 1794, it was rebuilt on a grid pattern, with rows of identical four-storey houses designed for the watchmakers’ needs. With barely 38,000 inhabitants, it still counts as the third largest French-speaking city in Switzerland; it’s also one of the highest in the whole country, sitting at 1000 metres up.

  I anticipate great things from my visit – but I’m disappointed. La Chaux-de-Fonds is ugly. It’s easy to become spoilt in Switzerland with all its chocolate-box towns and mediaeval buildings, but by any standards this is not an attractive place. It feels like a cross between some neglected French provincial town and a leftover of Tsarist central planning. Bleak is probably the best word. Maybe it looks better in high summer, though I can’t imagine there’s much in the way of street life even then, but on a cold January day it feels like I’ve been transported to Siberia. This is a town that will never win any beauty contests, though, along with nearby Le Locle, it became a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2009; presumably for its industrial past and urban planning rather than its aesthetic qualities. Apparently the two are ‘outstanding examples of mono-industrial manufacturing-towns which are well preserved and still active’.25 No wonder Karl Marx described it as a ‘huge factory-town’ in Das Kapital,26 though he probably meant that in a good way. I suspect he never actually visited what could possibly be Switzerland’s drabbest city.

  There are, however, a couple of pearls to be found, thanks to Le Corbusier, the architect formerly known as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and the most famous local boy made good. Another contender for that title is Louis Chevrolet, the car man, but I’ll stick with Le C as at least there’s something of his to see in La Chaux-de-Fonds. And buildings are so much more interesting than cars. And warmer when it’s cold and snowy outside. And when you get to look around a house as simple yet splendid as La Maison Blanche, you realise that there’s more to Swiss homes than wooden chalets. Its open-plan rooms and clean lines are way ahead of their time, looking more 1930s than 1912, the year the house was built. Across town is Le Corbusier’s second early triumph, the Villa Turque, a dream house. And for the likes of us, that’s what it will remain. Designed for a local watch bigwig, it’s now owned by Ebel, a watch company I’d never heard of, who are probably the only ones able to afford such a home, with its double-height reception room, vast bay windows and sensuous curves.

  Houses apart, Le Corbusier (and indeed Chevrolet) is noticeable by his absence. In true Swiss style there’s little to commemorate the town’s famous sons; doing that might be verging on pandering to celebrity. Or perhaps it’s sour grapes, given that both men only really found fame once they’d left home. Instead the town concentrates on its watches, which can never be accused of having egos bigger than their makers.

  The watches are honoured with their own museum, probably the ugliest building in town, and it’s potentially quite a long list of contenders. Thank goodness most of the concrete monstrosity that is the Musée International d’Horlogerie is hidden underground. Back in the days when people knew no better (that is, 1977) it was awarded the Prix Béton prize for a museum. That’s a prize for buildings made of concrete (béton is French, and also Swiss German, for concrete), preferably as grey and rough-looking as possible, if this winner is anything to go by. The only advantage is that its drab walls make the museum’s collection appear even more luminous: ornate pocket watches, an elegant sun-pendulum clock, early wristwatches for First World War soldiers, and mystery clocks seemingly with no mechanism. But the most noticeable thing is the near silence. Ticks, tocks and the occasional beep and chime are the only sounds to break the hush. It gives the museum a rather reverential air, part temple, part library.

  Despite not being a watch-spotter, I can’t help but be transfixed by the detail and craftsmanship on display. And become engrossed in the developments that have led to the slim wristwatches we now take for granted: first spring, first self-winder, first battery, first quartz and so on. Among the cases of watches from Swiss companies, my favourite is perhaps Girard-Perregaux, a local manufacturer. Not for its watches, which look much like any other, but for the company motto: ‘Watches for the few since 1791.’ No hiding the fact that they are ridiculously expensive and elitist. I’ll stick with my trusty Swatch, which I learn has ten stages of assembly, rather like an Airfix kit. The secret of its success was halving the number of components to 51, so cutting production costs and retail prices alike. Its launch in 1983 helped rescue a Swiss watch industry that was floundering in the face of an Asian-led quartz revolution. If S
watch hadn’t come along, maybe today Swiss watches would all be Girard-Perregaux, luxury trinkets for the very rich.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  As Swatch, Rolex and Omega – and indeed Girard-Perregaux – have proved, the Swiss watch industry is all about its names. Its success is based on having brands that mean quality and reliability. It’s about who you are as much as what you make, even if the mass market has never heard of you. The Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry lists official websites for 208 brands,27 many of which I suspect most Swiss people aren’t aware of. For example, Juvenia, Glycine and Vulcain have been around for decades but I’m betting none of you recognise them as watches; they sound more like face creams or sci-fi characters. Maybe their popularity is limited by the odd names (or more likely their prices), but then there’s the very English-sounding West End Watch Co., another new brand to me that was in fact launched in 1886. And it’s Swiss, despite the name.

  The Swiss themselves love watches, or at least watch shops. Almost every town has one, though perhaps they’re only there for the tourists. A typical city centre has a striking abundance of three types of shop: shoe, bread and watch. It’s hard to walk more than a few metres without passing one or all of the above, which is handy if you need a baguette for supper or a pair of red shoes. Or indeed want to splash out a small fortune on a new watch. That’s where the watch shops differ from the other two: they cover the whole price range, from 40 to 40,000Fr, as if it were quite normal for a high-street shop to sell something that costs half a year’s salary. What makes it more bizarre is that, except for Zurich, Swiss cities aren’t big enough to have a posh shopping district, so you can get some unlikely neighbours.