The Fascinating Story of Smiths: The Watch on Everest That History Forgot

Twenty-nine May, nineteen fifty three. Half past eleven in the morning. Edmund Hillary stands on the summit of Mount Everest. Twenty nine thousand and twenty nine feet. The highest point on the surface of the earth. On his wrist is a wristwatch. The watch is not a Rolex. It is a Smiths De Luxe, fifteen jewel lever escapement, signed "Made in England" below the subsidiary seconds dial, manufactured at a factory in Bishops Cleeve, Cheltenham. In a magazine advertisement published the following year, Hillary states it plainly. He carried the Smiths watch to the summit, and it worked perfectly.
The world does not remember this. The world remembers a Rolex.
Step back. In seventeen ninety, Britain produces almost half the world's watches. The workshops of Clerkenwell, in London, turn out two hundred thousand pieces a year. The label "Made in England" carries the prestige of the Royal Observatory and the marine chronometer, the most complex hand-crafted mechanism in the pre-industrial world. By eighteen fifty, the trade has collapsed. Swiss watches arrive by the boatload, smuggled at first, legal under Free Trade later. Machine-made watches from Waltham, Massachusetts, follow them in. The American system of interchangeable parts, applied to watchmaking, hollows out the British industry within a generation. Clerkenwell holds to its handcraft methods. The watchmakers of Prescot and Coventry organize. Nothing works.
By eighteen seventy, a watch sold under a British name in a British shop usually contains a Swiss movement. The dial reads "London" because the dial is signed in London. The mechanism inside has crossed the Channel.