George Daniels - Selling and rebuying the first watch (29/85)

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English watch-maker George Daniels (1926-2011) was most famous for creating the co-axial escarpment and could make a complete watch by hand. In his lifetime, he received many awards, including the rarely-given Gold Medal of the Clockmakers' Company of London. [Listener: Roger Smith; date recorded: 2003]
TRANSCRIPT: I was then ready to finish off my watch, make the dial and hands and so forth. Now, there was then the question of what was I going to do with the watch. I needed to sell it and I was a bit nervous about that because I didn't know how I was going to find a customer for it. A lot of people knew I was making it because I'd made sure they did know, in case they were interested, and in the end, my friend Cecil Clutton, the expert on all these different subjects, bought the watch. He said he was very, very apprehensive about the whole thing because he feared he wouldn't be able to afford it, but in the end he did and he paid £1900 for this watch. I was very happy to have the money because it kept me going for another year or so. Of course, it was quite a lot of money in those days, and that watch was a very good friend to me during the following years because after 4 years I bought it back from him and I gave him £8,000 for it. And I made him another watch, which meant that he couldn't hang on to my £8000 very long. He had to pay it back to me and I sold the watch for £12,000 and I then bought it back for £14,000 and sold it for £18,000. Then I bought it back for £20,000 and sold it for £24,000. So it did me very well and all those people that owned the first watch I'd made, and they were very pleased about that.
It's in America now and was owned by the famous Professor Landes, professor of commerce and social... I don't know, we'll have to find out what he called his book. He's Jewish, powerful, arrogant, continent, verbose, and has all the qualities you expect to find in a professor. And he wrote about my escapement in his book, 'The Unbound Prometheus', he wrote about the escapement in that book, which I'm very pleased because, I mean, he's a very famous international author, and I discovered afterwards he was quite pleased for it to be known that he knew something about watches. So that was beneficial on both sides. Unfortunately, he had to sell the watches. His wife became very ill and so he needed money. He wrote me a very nice letter and he said it was a tragedy, but he had to sell the watch and I wrote and told him that it didn't matter, that's what we bought these things for, you know, they're an investment which you use in the future when you need it.

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