There's this nice lecture by Roger W Smith on George Daniels:
It's very nice and in the Q&A section Roger mentions that the patents on the co-axial escapement have been up for a while. It would be neat to somebody else take up a co-axial. I understand that the swiss lever has been updated many times and the ones in a Breguet silicon or the Rolex 3255 have interestingly updated designs, but the co-ax is interesting, certainly what Roger W Smith is doing!
Yes, and Omega never paid Daniels a cent for the coaxial escapement technology, as I understand. Presumably because the patent was already expired back when they started using it too.
The patent is free for Daniel's original co-axial escapement design, not for Omega's current escapement, they are different, Omega can have it patented if they want to.
No watch company wants to mess with it, if you run into problem it will cost you a lot of money.
The most probably scenario I could see is that a company specialized in watch movements could use the original design (no patent issue), improve it to create a new caliber and sell to other watch manufacturers. It will take some years and millions $$$ in R & D and marketing.
If such scenario happens, you would face two possibilities :
1. Omega will have to lower price tags on their watches to lure customers.
2. Omega will increase price tags on their watches to maintain their superiority, and watches from other brands with the new Co-ax movement would have their price tags increased too (taking advantage of Omega's reputation).
For the time being I think if you like the Co-ax, buy an Omega watch, life is short, no need to wait for it to become available on other watch brands (it won't happen before WWIII).
As you say, it would be interesting to see how this could be executed by a more high end company than Omega. I'm not sure if people are as excited about coaxials as they used to be.
For a Co-ax, the thing that RWSmith mentions with emphasis is that the Swiss tended to be too arrogant to actually simply listen to and read Daniels' experience based guidance. I have a feeling that the R&D could be made more reasonable by this. Plus it would be a better movement!
Sure, a higher end co-ax would be interesting and might allow for a movement to be closer to the Daniels lubricant-free pocket watches, but at a price lower than RWS' almost entirely hand-made approach. Like an FPJourne type of situation.
However, imagine if someone like JLC did a co-ax? It could be a step above Omega, but still made in quantities. Again, you'd get a lot of refinement, but a different take on the co-ax and probably a lot of innovation.
I know there are issues with the co-ax in terms of simply regulating the movement and all servicing, but it would be neat to see things take off for it beyond what Omega is able to do.
People seem to be critical about Daniels having received the cold shoulder from the Swiss. My feeling is that while Daniels was certainly a great watchmaker, each Swiss manufacturer has at least half a dozen senior watchmakers on staff that are of a similar calibre (no pun intended). Take Ephrem Jobin, Pierre Genequand or Ludwig Oechslin for example. I'm sure that many specialists took great interest in the coaxial escapement, but had concrete reasons not to adopt it. As it is, coaxial technology is more a question of product differentiation than of technoligical progress.
Well, that's certainly true enough about the co-ax really being about marketing and brand differentiation versus a pure and clear advancement in horology.
Having said that, the stories we get are about people greeting Daniels with a combination of arrogance and incompetence rather than a true, respectful, consideration of the merits of the design.
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