![]() These students from the iPhone generation sound enthralled with a centuries-old pursuit. Their training lasts up to two years and teaches them everything from humankind's history of trying to measure time to precision soldering and repairing. Students who manically use mobile devices moments before they come to class are able to sit immobile for days to realign a hairspring inside a watch mechanism. They see beauty in clock springs, poetry in moving pendulums, ballet in the movement of gears. Ponytailed, tattooed and sporting T-shirts, the mostly twenty-something men, along with a few women, are passionate about their work. The students, mostly from Quebec but also from elsewhere in Canada, defy watchmaking's greying image. This week, a job ad was posted on the school bulletin board from a luxury watch boutique in Beverly Hills. In pragmatic terms, the school says 90 per cent of its specialized graduates find jobs, in places like jewellery stores and after-sale service centres, or working on timing mechanisms for vaults and safes. Yet to the teachers at the Trois-Rivières school, and the young students hunched over microscopic pins and springs in the school workshop, servicing the world's clocks and watches is a vocation. The median age of the institute's members is 63. had 44 schools in the 1970s today it has eight, according to the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute. Watchmaking schools across North America began shuttering schools in Montreal and Toronto closed in 1988. The advent of quartz-regulated, battered-operated watches in the 1970s was seen as the death knell of mechanical movements. In horology parlance, that makes it 10 minutes to midnight. Last June, a committee of the Quebec education department that examined the Trois-Rivières trade school concluded that with declining enrollment and only 10 to 15 students yearly, the watchmaking program should be abolished. Today, clocks glow from cellphones and microwave ovens, and watchmakers have the same fading aura as milkmen and telegraph operators. The diploma belonging to one of them still hangs on the school wall, a framed and yellowing witness to postwar promise.īut yesterday's skills are history. That year, 16 soldiers sat down behind eyepieces and workbenches and learned how to maintain and repair timepieces. In 1946, the Trois-Rivières school opened its doors to service men from the Second World War, offering wounded and war-scarred men a skill and a new life. ![]() "Who will repair broken watches? This may be an old trade, but it has a future." "We're the last ones, from coast-to-coast," said Robert Plourde, a veteran teacher at the school.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |