horology & frippery

The only reason I know the word horology is because of the passage I quote below.

The only reason I know the word frippery is because Murray Rothbard said Adam Smith considered diamonds "a mere frippery".

The description is accurate, but if the wording is a direct quote, I can't find the source.

Smith did call diamonds "the greatest of all superfluities". It's a word he uses quite a bit in The Wealth of Nations. For instance: "Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity."

It's amazing to me the hubris with which people commonly judge what is and isn't necessary -- especially when discussing the demonstrated preferences of others. Not just conservatives, but even and especially the egregiously hypocritical PoMos who march beneath the banner of subjectivity and relativism.

Adam Smith seems to have considered the distinction objective, but since the Marginal Revolution, most economists would demur. Value is subjective.

One man's superfluity is another man's necessary. Perhaps more significant is the fact that the frippery of one era can become the indispensable technology of the next.

This is from How the West Grew Rich, p. 148f:

Until about 1880, the principle technological achievements of Western industry were in the mechanical arts. The mechanical skills needed for these accomplishments developed in substantial part in response to a Western interest in horology. This interest in timekeeping was traceable to the town clocks of the Middle Ages. As early as the sixteenth century, clocks had their eager collectors: the Emperor Charles V is said to have had three thousand of them. The invention of the telescope and the Copernican revolution in astronomy in the seventeenth century supplied an impetus for improvements in the accuracy of clocks. In struggling with the problems of building accurate clocks and portable watches, clockmakers advanced Western knowledge of precision machining; the effects of changes in temperature on different materials; friction; the uses and misuses of gear trains, levers, ratchets, springs, and other elements of mechanical systems; selection of suitable materials; lubrication; and mechanical durability. By 1750, when the Industrial Revolution was about to impose immense demands on the skill and ingenuity of mechanical designers, Western clockmakers had already brought mechanical design to an advanced state of development.

Much of the early Western interest in clocks and watches was in no sense utilitarian. In order to fit their development -- and the development of Western mechanical skills -- to the causal pattern, economic need to technological response, one must allow economic need to include fad, fashion, fascination with complex mechanisms, and similar foibles. Much later, the timeclock became a symbol of factory discipline; but Western interest in clocks and watches long antedated the factory system. A non-utilitarian fascination with clocks was not limited to the West, for clocks proved welcome gifts from early traders to Chinese officials, who became avid collectors but made no practical use of them whatever. Even the medieval town clocks were as much ornamental as useful. For watches more than for clocks, the market consisted almost entirely of those who bought them as articles of jewelry, status symbols, or from collector's enthusiasm. That the market existed was fortunate, for portable watches proved much more challenging to mechanical ingenuity than clocks, and hence were a substantial additional source of Western skills in the mechanical arts.

Horology was thus a jeweler's or astronomer's art, with one exception: the marine chronometer. Until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, navigators had no reliable or accurate way to find a ship's longitude, and as a result many lives, ships, and cargoes were lost in strandings on shores and reefs that had been thought to be many miles distant. Local noon, the time when the sun reaches its maximum altitude above the horizon, could be determined with reasonable accuracy by eighteenth-century instruments. What was needed was a clock accurately showing time at 0º longitude, for with such a clock mariners could determine their longitude by comparing local noon, as they observed it, to the time shown by the clock: each hour of time difference translated into 15º of longitude. Accurate eighteenth-century clocks depended, however, on the pendulum, which did not function on the unstable platform supplied by a ship. "Longitude, then, was the great mystery of the age, a riddle to seamen, a challenge to scientists, a stumbling block to kings and statesmen. Only such will-o-the-wisps as the fountain of youth and the philosophers' stone could match its aura of tantalizing promise -- and longitude was real."¹

Later, in the nineteenth century, accurate watches were needed both for the operation of the railroads and for passengers, who had to get to the station on time.²
High-grade watches became a status symbol, worn with pride by those who were far from the reach of factory discipline.

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1. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 111.

2. The railway companies themselves and their employees were destined to become a major market for watches, but even more their riders, who not only wanted to know the hour and minute in order to catch trains but found their entire consciousness of time altered by the requirements and opportunities of a railway world.