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Watchmaker / Horologist
Assembles, repairs, and maintains watches and clocks — some with hundreds of tiny moving parts.
Did you know?
Patek Philippe's Calibre 89 pocket watch, made in 1989 for the firm's 150th birthday, has 1,728 parts and 33 complications.
How subjects help
- Physics: Adjust the balance wheel and hairspring that swing back and forth to keep perfect time.
- Mathematics: Count gear teeth and work out ratios so each hand turns at exactly the right speed.
- Art & Design: Restore and polish dials and cases so an old watch looks as good as new.
- Chemistry: Clean tiny parts in special solutions and put the right oil in each moving spot.
A famous name
Abraham-Louis Breguet: French watchmaker who invented the tourbillon, still found in luxury watches today.
Try it yourself: Take apart a click pen
- Click the pen a few times and guess what is happening inside. Draw your guess.
- Twist the pen apart slowly over a table so no small parts roll away. Lay every piece out in order. (Keep the little spring away from young children.)
- Draw each part and label what you think it does: spring, ink tube, clicker.
- Put it back together, but leave one part out. Does it still work? Try each part in turn to find which ones really matter.
Engineers and mechanics take machines apart ("reverse engineering") to learn how the parts work together, find what failed and design simpler versions.
Adapted from TeachEngineering (University of Colorado Boulder): Disassemble a Click Pen.
Also try: Build a rubber-band instrument.
Known for it in
Switzerland, Germany, Japan, France, UK