Hands of Time : A watchmaker's history

"Forty-thousand years of our relationship with time condensed into 288 pages: a hugely entertaining achievement." –Esquire

"As impeccably crafted and precisely engineered as any of the watches on which the author has worked so lovingly over the years, this book is a joy to behold and a wonder to enjoy." –Simon Winchester, author of The Perfectionists and Land

An award-winning watchmaker—one of the few practicing the art in the world today—chronicles the invention of time through the centuries-long story of one of mankind's most profound technological achievements: the watch.

Timepieces have long accompanied us on our travels, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest, the ice of the arctic to the sands of the deserts, outer space to the surface of the moon. The watch has sculpted the social and economic development of modern society; it is an object that, when disassembled,...