I have long had a weakness for practical bicycles and watches. I study them regularly, use them daily, and trade them more than I should. Perhaps, like the mascot of this Substack, I am destined to be a prisoner of cogs and gears.
Bikes and watches share more than toothed wheels. They even have a few things to teach Democrats about the value of conviction-based leadership and the need to abandon preference falsification. Bear with me here.
Excellent bikes and watches are obsolete products that marry engineering and design.1 Both rely on fads and fashion. In cycling, racers set the standard, demanding lycra clothing, drop handlebars, space-age frame materials, fancy electronics, clip-in pedals, and fast gears. Luxury branding, advanced engineering, and exotic complications shape horological fashion. Enthusiasts are expected to value longer power reserves, greater water resistance, or brighter luminescence. We are supposed to enjoy precious metals, exhibition case backs, extreme accuracy, anti-magnetism, and in-house movements.
In both industries, orthodoxy can demand preference falsification. Thought leaders learn to misrepresent their views or face public condemnation. Watch and bike enthusiasts are expected to say things they know to be untrue and refuse to say things they know are true. This problem is familiar to academics, journalists, Democrats, employees of woke companies, or anyone else caught sideways in political correctness.
Both industries spawn iconoclasts, but this made a difference in cycling. Grant Peterson has extreme views about bicycles. He first came to my attention in 1983 when he and Mary Anderson published a series of booklets illustrating the elevation profile of every decent cycling road in the Bay Area. Grant married Mary and went to work for Bridgestone, a Japanese tire company that made bicycles. He designed elegant, practical bikes that are still highly sought after.
When Bridgestone quit the bike business in 1994, Peterson started a bike company to challenge cycling’s racing aesthetic. (He does not oppose bike racing but hates how designers, manufacturers, and retailers allow racers to dominate everyday riding.) Rivendell makes steel bikes with lugs and attractive paint jobs – no aluminum, titanium, bamboo, or carbon fiber. Pedals are flat, not clip-in. Tires are wide, and handlebars are high for comfort. Clothing is wool, not lycra. Triple chainrings for low gears. Leather saddles, canvas saddlebags, fenders, baskets, bells, kickstands, and lights. I have owned a half dozen Rivendells over the years. The best of them are magic.
Peterson has built a passionate following, and his dissonant views have reshaped the bicycle industry. The late Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter rode his bikes. Richard Schwinn, whose grandfather made my first bike and possibly yours, called Rivendell “a church disguised as a bike company.” The New Yorker just ran a must-read profile of Grant, “The Art of Taking it Slow.”
British engineer Andrew Ritchie is another iconoclastic cycling voice. Ritchie figured out how best to fold a bicycle and founded Brompton to prove it. Like Rivendell, Brompton is a cult. It sponsors an annual World Championship race that requires riders to wear a sports coat. I have traveled and commuted widely on my Brommie and can attest to its versatility. It fits under seats, overhead in airplanes, on any bus or train, and in the trunk of any car. For those who share my love of urban cycling, Bromptons are brilliant. Creative dissidents like Peterson and Richie have not only built a passionate following. They made the industry far less conservative and created breathing space for others to innovate.
Watchmaking has no Grant Peterson to challenge its polite fictions. Enthusiasts are expected to drool over things like longer power reserves, which rarely matter.2 We are told to cheer dial luminescence—a cheap party trick played with black lights. We rave about water resistance, quietly knowing that more than 50-100 meters is pointless. We sagely extoll the virtues of extreme accuracy, exhibition case backs, anti-magnetism, and in-house movements, afraid to point out when they add more cost than practical value. We swoon over complications like moon phases, perpetual calendars, skeletons, minute repeaters, tourbillions, and chronographs that make watches more difficult to use, expensive, and fragile.
Watchmaking (like Democrats) needs to cultivate people willing to assert sensible values and expose naked emperors. Exalt in gorgeous, well-designed dials that put art on your wrist. Celebrate bracelets that taper and can be adjusted and removed without tools. Point out that hardening metals so they never scratch is valuable and no longer expensive. Insist that reliability, durability, and serviceability count for more than whether a movement is made “in-house.” Advocate for prices that reflect costs, not a campaign for watches to sell as “Veblen goods.”
Watchmaking has iconoclasts, of course. But instead of rebels, they are hucksters like Richard Mille. His pioneering but fugly watches sell for an average of $350,000. (Not a typo.) Others, like Christopher Ward and Monta, have the right values but wish to be liked. They are unwilling to poke their industry peers in the eye, as Peterson has cheerfully done for three decades. Even Grand Seiko, with a singular design aesthetic backed by extraordinary artistic and engineering talent, takes a polite view of conservative Swiss watch culture. This is an amusing courtesy, considering that its parent did not hesitate to decimate Swiss watchmaking by introducing quartz watches in the 1970s.3
Watchmakers and Democrats must renounce preference falsification and embrace practical artistry and engineering. They should revisit Apple’s Think Different campaign and cultivate the crazy ones.
“Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
Mechanical bicycles and watches are both technologically obsolete. E-bikes outsell analog bikes in most places. Quartz and smart watches are more cost-effective, accurate, and practical than mechanical watches. Like people obsessed with vinyl records however, watch or bike enthusiasts don’t care about obsolescence.
Power reserve does not matter if you wear the same watch every day because every watch can survive the night. However, if you rotate among four or more watches, your least-worn watches will usually need rewinding, even if they have an extended power reserve.
Other horological iconoclasts are too aloof. Some are effete modern artists like Max Büsser of MB&F. A few are extraordinary watchmakers like American Roland Murphy, Roger Smith or Craig and Rebecca Struthers in the UK, and François-Paul Journe in Geneva. These are essentially nineteenth-century artisans who hand-craft museum pieces in their ateliers. They have little interest in rocking the industry boat.