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The Makers' Makers |
Nicole, Nielsen & Co
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By the time the young Victoria succeeded to the English throne in 1837, London was at the centre of the watchmaking world, its only rival being Paris. Anyone with ambition would have looked to one of these European capitols as the place to work and make their mark. As such, London was a magnet for the skills of many young Swiss and Scandinavian watchmakers throughout Victoria’s reign.
The most capable of these immigrants, throughout both the 18th and 19th centuries, became established figures in English life and the work of makers such as Justin Vulliamy and Josiah Emery is both well known and highly regarded. There were, however, many lessor known figures whose contribution to English watchmaking is no less important. One of the more interesting of these was the firm Nicole & Capt which had its beginnings in Switzerland in the very year of Queen Victoria’s coronation. Two years later the firm had set up in London, at 80B Dean Street, and was being run by Adolphe Nicole and Jules Capt. The firm later moved to 14 Soho Square where it remained until the company finally closed in 1934. Fig 1.
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Fig 1: It has always been a concern to horologists of exactly how much of Nicole, Nielsen’s output was made in London. Happily, their trade catalogue clearly shows that the Soho workshops were fully fitted to handle all aspects of their work. |
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Fig 2: Line engraving giving a perspective view of Adolphe Nicole’s ‘constant force’ escapement from the 1844 Patent. One of two variations described, no example of either is known to have survived. |
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Jules Capt may have died in 1876 because his place as partner in the firm was taken by the Danish born Sophus Emil Nielsen, at which time the firm became Nicole, Nielsen & Co. This name is recognisable to watch collectors as the firm is known to have produced many of the very finest ‘London made’ watches of the period. Their output includes tourbillons and other watches with repeating, chronograph and perpetual calendar complications. Many of their best watches bear the names of London’s premier retailers, Charles Frodsham and Dent, and these names, in conjunction with Nicole’s quality of manufacture, ensure these watches now command a high price among collectors and at auction some of the best have reached prices in excess of £100,000. These are rare pieces, and have been well publicised, but Nicole also made many other types of watch worthy of consideration.
From the beginning, Nicole and Capt were producing well made and interesting watches, most of which bear a wide variety of lessor known retailers names and these can still be bought for relatively little money. The best features of this firm’s earlier work are fairly easy to recognise and most stem from the designs as described in the important Patent No 10,348 taken out by Adolphe Nicole in 1844. Fig 2.
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Fig 3: A good example of Nicole & Capt’s earlier work with Duplex escapement, retailed by Dent. Gold openface case with repeating slide in the band, hallmarked 1846, casemaker AN (Adolphe Nicole). Note also the early and stylish shape of keyless button. Lovely signed enamel dial with offset seconds. Blued-steel fleur-de-leys hands. 48 mm diameter. |
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Fig 4: The underdial quarter repeating work of the watch shown in Figure 3. It shows the beautifully finished and perfectly functional steel work for which the company was justly famous in the trade - it being a view of a watch that customers would never normally see. |
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The patent includes the first practical keyless work for both going-barrel and fusee watches, though very few of the latter seem to have been made by the firm as they were strong believers in the Swiss practise of getting rid of the costly and troublesome (as they saw it) fusee. The patent includes chronograph work that allowed a seconds recording hand to be ‘returned to zero’ by means of a heart shaped cam, a most important feature of all mechanical chronographs that is still in use today. Fig 10. Also shown is a clever and simple way of providing resilient banking in watches with a Duplex escapement. Fig 5.
Nicole & Capt were great admirers of this escapement and seemed to understand that it worked best with a light escape wheel and a light load on the locking and impulse jewels. While earlier English watches with Duplex escapements often show troublesome signs of wear, making them poor timekeepers and expensive to repair, much of Nicole & Capt’s output has survived in wearable condition.
Having mentioned the heart shaped cam in their chronograph design of 1844, it should be said that no example from this date is known to have survived and it may be that the firm was not able to make it work reliably. It was only with a later Nicole Patent, No 1461 of 1862, which shows a ‘castle wheel’ combined with the heart shape cam, that the firm is known to have manufactured such chronographs. Even Nicole, Nielsen & Co, in their trade catalogue of circa 1910, of which my reprint is now available, attribute their invention of the true, return to zero, chronograph to 1862, not the earlier date. By 1871 they were also making ‘split-seconds chronographs’ in which two seconds hands can be operated independently and returned to zero, allowing two events to be timed.
This term ‘split-seconds’ can be very confusing as most of the earliest simple chronographs, including Nicole’s in the 1844 patent, were designed to have two concentric seconds hands moving as one. Fig 6. Pushing a pin in the watch band would stop one of the hands, leaving the other to rotate with the running of the watch. On releasing the pin the stopped hand would immediately catch up with the moving hand, neither of which could be returned to zero. Such chronograph work was, for the obvious reason, called split-seconds, but the term has since come to be universally used with the later, post 1871 meaning.
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Fig 5: Close-up view of part of a Duplex movement, showing the kink in the outer coil of the balance-spring and the pin in the arm of the balance with which it acts if the arc of the balance gets too large. |
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