Who Was George Daniels? Inside The Life Of Watchmaking's Greatest Genius On His 100th Birthday

I was a few weeks into my first job covering watches when my editor dropped a battered copy of Watchmaking on my desk. "Read this before you write another word," she said. That night, I excitedly opened the book expecting a rich story of how watches came to be and the pioneers behind the industry. I was quite surprised when I noticed it was closer to an engineering manual than a story. But I vividly remember getting stuck on the section where Daniels describes cutting a screw so small it could pass through the eye of a needle, by hand, with no machine to help him. I put the book down and thought: this man built entire watches, alone, from raw metal. A hundred years after his birth, that sentence still stops people the way it stopped me.

The Watchmaker Who Changed Watchmaking Forever

On a grey London afternoon sometime in the early 1930s, a five-year-old boy slipped out of a cramped, unhappy house to escape the noise inside. He wandered the streets, as he often did, and found an object in a field: a broken pocket watch, its case cracked open. He picked it up and looked inside. It was like seeing the centre of the universe. Tiny wheels, springs, and jewels, all moving in perfect, silent order, utterly indifferent to the chaos he'd just walked away from. 

That boy was George Daniels. He would go on to become the closest thing horology has ever had to a one-man renaissance: the last watchmaker capable of building an entire timepiece  case, dial, movement, every last screw with his own hands, and the inventor of the co-axial escapement, the most significant advance in mechanical timekeeping in over two centuries. This year marks 100 years since his birth in 1926, and the watch world is still, in every sense, running on his ideas.

The Boy Who Found The Universe Inside A Watch

George Daniels was born in Edgware, north London, in 1926, into a family of eleven children and considerable hardship. There was, by his own account, just one chair in the family home. His father repaired radios, while Daniels' childhood was marked by an unhappy domestic environment that he would remain guarded about throughout his life. He left school at 14 and began repairing watches while working in a mattress factory, eventually continuing the trade during National Service in Suez. 

By the time he returned to Britain, he had developed the independence that would become the defining characteristic of his career. Rather than following the conventional route into a watchmaking manufacture, Daniels taught himself to make watch components from raw materials. He later formalised his knowledge through evening classes in horology at Northampton Polytechnic Institute, but the essential education had already taken place at his own workbench. He was not content simply to understand how a watch worked. He wanted to know how every component could be made, improved and perfected by his own hands.

The Bentley That Opened The Door To Breguet

There is a wonderful irony to the fact that one of the most important encounters in modern watchmaking began with an old car. Daniels' passion for vintage automobiles led him into the Vintage Sports-Car Club and ultimately to Cecil “Sam” Clutton, a motoring enthusiast, antiquarian horologist and collector. Clutton recognised something unusual in the young watch repairer's mechanical abilities and introduced him to a world of horology that lay far beyond repair work. More importantly, he introduced Daniels to Abraham-Louis Breguet. In 1969, Clutton bought a watch Daniels had made entirely by hand, a transaction that helped establish Daniels as a serious independent watchmaker.

Breguet would become the ghostly mentor who accompanied Daniels throughout his career. The French-Swiss master had been dead for more than a century when Daniels was born, but his ideas remained alive in his watches. Daniels studied them with forensic intensity, eventually publishing The Art of Breguet, a landmark work containing more than 100 of his own technical drawings and analyses of Breguet's innovations. He was fascinated not simply by Breguet's artistry but by his willingness to challenge accepted mechanical wisdom. In that sense, Breguet and Daniels were separated by centuries but united by temperament: both believed that tradition was something to understand, not something to obey blindly.

Solving A Problem Breguet Couldn't

One of Breguet's great unfinished ideas was the natural escapement, developed in 1789 to reduce the sliding friction inherent in conventional escapements. Daniels took that historical problem and attempted to solve it for the modern era. The result was his independent double-wheel escapement, developed during the 1970s with the involvement of fellow English watchmaker Derek Pratt and initially created for American collector Seth Atwood. By using two escape wheels and separate going trains, Daniels sought to replace the sliding contact of the traditional lever escapement with a more direct, tangential impulse.

The mechanism was ingenious but ultimately too large and complex for easy miniaturisation. Daniels himself recognised its limitations. Yet its importance lies partly in what it represented: he was prepared to revisit a problem that had remained unresolved for almost two centuries and approach it from first principles. His Space Traveller watches would become spectacular expressions of this philosophy, combining the double-wheel escapement with twin going trains capable of displaying mean solar and sidereal time. For Daniels, mechanical complexity was not an obstacle. If a problem was interesting enough, it was worth solving simply because it could be solved.

Then Came The Co-Axial

If the independent double-wheel escapement was Daniels' tribute to Breguet, the Co-Axial escapement was his defining contribution to modern watchmaking. Conceived in 1975, it addressed the same fundamental enemy: friction. The conventional Swiss lever escapement relies on sliding contact between the pallet stones and escape-wheel teeth. Daniels' design separated the locking and impulse functions by using two escape wheels mounted on the same axis, allowing the balance to receive a more direct impulse and dramatically reducing sliding friction.

The brilliance of the Co-Axial was not merely that it worked. It addressed one of mechanical watchmaking's oldest problems while remaining sufficiently compact to be adapted for a wristwatch. Daniels tested the concept first in a pocket watch and later in a modified Omega Speedmaster. He also spent years attempting to persuade established Swiss manufacturers to adopt it. Patek Philippe eventually allowed him to build a Co-Axial wristwatch in the early 1980s, which he wore and tested for years. Industrial development gathered momentum in the 1990s, eventually leading to Omega's introduction of the Co-Axial escapement in 1999.

That moment transformed Daniels' invention from the work of an individual English watchmaker into an industrially relevant technology. Omega refined the escapement across successive generations of movements, and what began on Daniels' workbench ultimately became a defining part of the brand's mechanical identity. The irony is almost too perfect: the industry that had repeatedly rejected his invention eventually incorporated it on a scale Daniels could never have achieved alone.

More Than An Inventor

Yet reducing Daniels to the Co-Axial escapement would be a profound injustice. His watches were extraordinary mechanical objects in their own right. He created tourbillons, remontoirs, chronometers and complicated pocket watches whose technical sophistication was matched by their visual restraint. His engine-turned silver dials, slender hands and carefully proportioned cases demonstrated that engineering and beauty were not separate disciplines.

His two completely handmade wristwatches, the Four Minute Tourbillon and Spring Case Tourbillon, stand among the clearest expressions of his philosophy. The Spring Case Tourbillon, completed in the early 1990s, featured an ingenious hinged inner case that could reveal the movement without removing the watch from the wrist. And even in his final years, Daniels was still pursuing impossible combinations. An unfinished pocket-watch movement found at his death brought together a one-minute tourbillon, Co-Axial escapement and 15-second remontoir d'égalité an appropriately excessive final project for a man who believed that mechanical unnecessaryness could itself be part of a watch's charm.

The Man Behind The Legend

The private George Daniels was considerably more complicated than the heroic figure that history can sometimes create. He was fiercely demanding, intensely private and, by his own admission, not always a good husband or father. He married Juliet Marryat in 1964, and the marriage ended in divorce. He had a daughter, Sarah-Jane, but their relationship became estranged. Daniels' personal life should therefore not be polished into a convenient narrative of genius and sacrifice. The difficult parts matter because they reveal the extraordinary price of his single-mindedness.

His standards at the workbench, meanwhile, bordered on the obsessive. Any component that failed to meet his expectations went into a small tin he called “the graveyard”, regardless of the hours invested in making it. He preferred ring spanners to adjustable ones when working on his beloved Bentleys because they reduced the risk of damaging a nut. His cars, motorcycles and Leica cameras were not unrelated hobbies; they were expressions of the same mind that saw beauty in precision engineering. He approached machines as living systems that could always be understood more deeply and made better.

Enter Roger W. Smith

Perhaps the greatest measure of Daniels' legacy is not found in his own watches at all. It is found in Roger W. Smith. Smith arrived in Daniels' world as a young watchmaker and became his protégé. On the Isle of Man, Daniels passed on something more valuable than technical knowledge: a philosophy. The lesson was that a watchmaker should not simply assemble components manufactured elsewhere. The watchmaker should understand the entire object, its engineering, construction, decoration, finishing and final assembly and possess the skills necessary to bring the complete vision to life. Daniels had demonstrated that this could still be done by one individual. Smith chose to carry that principle into the future. Click here for a glimpse of Roger W Smith's latest release.

This is where the Daniels story becomes much larger than the man himself. The independent watchmaking landscape that exists today populated by names such as Philippe Dufour, François-Paul Journe, Kari Voutilainen, Denis Flageollet, Rexhep Rexhepi and Roger W. Smith reflects a philosophy Daniels helped establish. François-Paul Journe once described Daniels as the pioneer who showed the path towards “horology of Art”. That description captures something fundamental: Daniels restored the idea of the watchmaker as an author.

The Legacy Is Still Ticking

George Daniels died on the Isle of Man on October 21, 2011, aged 85. His funeral procession crossed the island's mountain roads in a line of vintage cars, an appropriately Daniels-like farewell. The collections he left behind were ultimately channelled into the George Daniels Educational Trust, ensuring that his commitment to craftsmanship and education would continue beyond his lifetime.

A century after his birth, the most remarkable thing about George Daniels is not that his name has survived. It is how deeply his ideas have embedded themselves in modern horology. The Co-Axial escapement became an industrial reality. His double-wheel escapement, once considered too impractical for the wrist, eventually found new life in watches by Charles Frodsham and Bernhard Lederer. His books remain essential reading. His handmade watches have become horological landmarks. And his philosophy continues through the work of the independent watchmakers who followed him. 

But perhaps his greatest achievement was simpler. At a time when industrialisation had made it increasingly difficult for a single craftsman to control every aspect of a complicated watch, George Daniels proved that it could still be done. He showed that one person's hands, intellect and imagination could stand against an entire manufacturing system. He took inspiration from Breguet, challenged convention, invented anew, and then handed that philosophy to the next generation.

George Daniels may have died 15 years ago. But every time a Co-Axial escapement beats, every time an independent watchmaker chooses to make rather than merely assemble, and every time a young horologist picks up Watchmaking and decides to learn the craft from first principles, Daniels is still at the bench. His watches were finite, however, ideas were not. And that may be the most enduring timepiece George Daniels ever created.

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