Hands of Time: A Watchmaker's History

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Switzerland (and Japan and the United States) make appearances as supporting characters, but Struthers stays close to home, and she does it well. Rebecca Struthers takes us on a fascinating journey through history looking at our relationship to time and timekeeping.

What I have got from this book was unbelievable story about women whose whole life was dedicated to this old and even romantic practice of watch reparing and watch making, awesome and really amazing history of measuring time and ofcourse watches and amazing lesson about cherising our time on this Earth. I was hoping to learn something about the details of the mechanisms, how they work, and how they have changed over time. From here the book looks at how man has tried to keep track of the time, the days, the months, and how this helped in our development. Struthers approaches this history with a eye for interesting stories which sum up large portions of the human relationship with time.

D. in horology) Rebecca Struthers takes us on her personal journey to becoming a watchmaker, intertwined with a brief history of watchmaking and timekeeping around the world. Though we still enjoy wristwatches in a sense, the art of mechanical watchmaking is nearly lost to us. It would not be a stretch to say that the invention of mechanical timekeepers has been as significant for human culture as the printing press.

Horology is the name for the study and measurement of time, and I learned quite a bit from this book. Hands of Time is a journey through watchmaking history, from the earliest attempts at time-keeping, to the breakthrough in engineering that gave us the first watch, to today – where the timepieces hold cultural and historical significance beyond what its first creators could have imagined.She explores this through the watches and other timepieces that were significant to technical design, changing fashions and society's attitudes to time. Bewitching and spanning cultures and continents, watchmaker Struthers’ captivating book reveals the crucial role time-pieces have played in our attitudes to mortality, work, leisure, politics and more throughout centuries. Rather, more attention is given to changes in the social and cultural role of timekeepers through time and the resultant design and formfactor shifts.