Word: antoniotti
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...acquiring? Computerized 3-D animation? Some slick new graphics software? Think again. Like generations before them in the high mountain valleys of the Swiss Jura, Sandra and Bastien are discovering the intricacies of mechanical watchmaking. "Forty years ago, people were learning exactly the same thing," says their teacher Yves Antoniotti. "Some of the technology has evolved, but the basic techniques remain unchanged." Techniques like hand-polishing screw-heads until they gleam like mirrors, or grinding axle-ends down to a 10th of a millimeter using miniature lathes. And the young apprentices are also assimilating that other cardinal virtue...
...assembling the 92 minuscule components that make up a Zenith Marine Chronometer - a complex piece of micro-engineering that is as technically obsolete as the manual typewriter. Yet nowadays, that kind of obsolescence fetches premium prices. "The boom today is in complicated mechanical watches for the luxury market," Antoniotti explains...
...precise-looking 48-year-old with close-cropped white hair and a neatly-trimmed goatee, Antoniotti did his own apprenticeship here in the 1960s and lived through the lean years of the '70s and '80s, when cheap quartz watches from the Far East decimated the Swiss industry's traditional market. "If I'd had kids back then, I'd never have advised them to go into this business," he says. But today that trend has been thrown into reverse as watch manufacturers scramble to make up for two decades when recruiting was nonexistent...
...pound class: P. O. Johnson '33 defeated Antoniotti (T) by decision...
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