The Legend of the Boy Who Fixed a Watch

The tale is a good one. Around 1679, a horse dealer named Péter is said to have come home to the mountain village of La Sagne with a broken watch bought in London, a rarity so few people in the region had ever seen one. A local teenager, Daniel JeanRichard, examined it, worked out how it functioned, and mended it, then went on to build watches of his own and even his own tools, including one of the first wheel-cutting engines seen in Switzerland, a machine that cut a watch's tiny toothed gears far more precisely than a hand file ever could.

The story was first written down almost a century later, in 1766, by the historian Frédéric-Samuel Ostervald, and it grew with the telling. JeanRichard himself was real, and by most accounts a genuine pioneer of the trade in the Jura mountains. But historians are careful to note that Geneva already had watchmakers long before he was born, and that the craft in the Jura grew out of many farm workshops, not one gifted boy.

What the legend gets right is a texture of place: long winters spent in stone farmhouses, where families supplemented farming by cutting and finishing watch parts by hand. JeanRichard later moved to Le Locle and taught the trade to his five sons, and Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds remain celebrated watchmaking towns to this day.