The delighted lad began to take the delicate mechanism apart, studying carefully each wheel and spring and lever until he felt that he understood exactly how it should work. Then, when he had succeeded in reassembling the parts and in making the watch tick bravely once more, he was seized with a great ambition to build another one all by himself.
After many experiments with his crude locksmith tools, he did produce a watch which would run and which would tell time after a fashion—the first watch ever made in the Neuchatel district—but it did not satisfy his artist's soul and he realized that he must have better tools.
Somebody told him that there was in Geneva a machine for cutting wheels, and he set out to see it for himself, only to come back sadly disappointed. Wherever he asked to see the machine, the canny Geneva craftsmen shook their heads. This eager lad from another town had far too intelligent a face to be allowed to learn the precious secrets. The most that they would do was to let him have a few of the wheels made by the machine.
Then he began to work out for himself a machine to cut the wheels, and at last succeeded in the task, so that before long he was well on the way to becoming a watch manufacturer. Richard, however, was generous with his ideas; he instructed a number of the young men of his district, so that watchmaking soon began to flourish in his town and in those about it.
We have now seen how the watchmaking industry became established in two great centers—in Geneva, where the highest quality was maintained, but under the rule of the guild, which did not encourage quantity of output, and in the Neuchatel region where no guild system existed. In the course of time this latter region overtook and passed in quantity of output that of Geneva. By 1818, the Neuchatel district of the Jura was turning out watches at the rate of 130,000 a year.
The solid old Geneva watchmakers criticized their rivals as being less exacting in quality and less careful as to the standard of gold used in their cases, but the Neuchatel people had no difficulty in finding customers; we read that one hundred and forty of their merchants went twice a year to the Leipsig fair, where they sometimes sold watches to the value of four million francs ($800,000) in a year.