VIII Masculine Superiority

Fig. 18. Fine Patek Philippe 18K gold antique pocket watch circa 1878    

Fig. 19. Johnathan Woollett,Watch & Clock Maker, Maidstone

While Section VII reveals that the scientific complexity of a pocket watch places the holder in a subordinate position, it can also nearly simultaneously advantage intellectual superiority. Pepys goes on to describe how he uses his watch to calculate the time it takes him to walk from his home to work: “[I] do find myself to come within two minutes constantly to the same place at the end of each quarter of an hour.” He thus has the impression that, with his private ownership of time, he is capable to calculate, and to, in turn, build his own private intricacies of his daily life. He has thus the satisfaction of personal intellectual agency to translate his diurnal life into trivial technical language that endows the power to foresee and to understand the daily. Looking into the last disclosure is conspicuously feeding into the pride of a secret (hence private) intellectual proprietorship.


Past the series of personalized or privatized layers lead to the visible mechanics of the watch. It is a tradition anchored from the very first watches of the 17th century onwards that the skeleton be revealable and observable. (Fig. 18) Many watches embrace the skeleton feature and make sometimes have it participate with the decorations by including see through watches, to constantly remind the holder that he owns the scientific triumph. It is as though the revealed mechanism at the core is the holder's deepest secret, such that every holder desires to be the sole owner of the scientific wonder.  Moreover, punctuality at the time was considered a virtue in men, a sign of good character and good manners. As a virtue, punctuality was generally sought after by the male public, for everyone desired to be virtuous. It is this pursuit to be the timekeeper, the bearer of masculine virtue and secrets which is a notion that is directly depicted or referred to in the watch paper of Fig. 19. The man has a classical body and long beard and hair, alluding to wisdom: those who own a watch are indirectly associated to a man of virtue and wisdom. This leads our exhibition towards the next section which is the proprietorship of the pocket watch as particularly gender based.