The book is a history of a single watch

The Supercomplication is the Mona Lisa of watches for men, the most intricate watch ever produced. It contained 24 complications—those are features outside of timekeeping. It calculates the time of sunrise and sunset, it strikes the hours, the quarter hour and minutes playing the same melody that rings from Big Ben, its perpetual calendar does not require adjustment until the year 2100, and it has a celestial chart that perfectly mapped the night sky over Manhattan – and it’s encased in 18-karat gold. This truly one-of-a-kind piece was entirely crafted, calculated and finished by hand.

Henry Graves, Jr. was the financier who commissioned the watch. And Graves had a horological rival, the industrialist James Ward Packard. They happened to be two of the greatest watch collectors of the 20th century. There was this mystique that surrounded the pair and their pursuit to possess the most complicated timepiece. The more I poked around, watches for women though, I realized that this story told a much bigger tale: It includes the birth of the automobile, electricity, America’s ascendency as a superpower, and the blossoming wealth culture.

In the book you describe watches as the high-tech gadgets of their day, how so?

We take for granted that it actually took 500 years before accurate timekeeping existed, let alone the phenomenal technological complexity of mechanical timepieces. They represent a tremendous benchmark in precision engineering. Until the mid-19th century, watchmakers were the world’s most innovative engineers. Inside a watch is an entire universe of miniature machinery 21sQW1F2 designed to be 99.999% accurate 365 days of the year – for generations. There is no planned obsolescence in horology.

Initially, clocks and watches for men were playthings of the elite, royalty, the aristocracy, and later America’s industrial barons. The great watchmakers sought patronage of their grand clients—European royalty to the Ottoman Sultans and the Chinese Emperors. They tried to dazzle their patrons with their ingenuity. When Graves and Packard came on the scene most collectors were not just wealthy but had put together collections comprised of antiques.