Victorian Steampunk Jewellery

This blog is really a response to Maduncle Cliff’s posts the other week. His look at the ‘steam punk’aesthetic caught my eye as I happened to be working on what appeared to be a couple of 150 year old examples in the Museum’s watch collection.

The urge to cut-up and repurpose old watch parts into new artistic forms was something the Victorians appear to have been aware of in the 1880s. But although the results look very much like steampunk they appear to have been made as a direct result of changing times in the watch-making world rather than a desire to embrace a new aesthetic.

Sprial chain drive from a verge watch, Powerhouse Museum H9076

For around 300 years most watches used a verge escapement which controlled the speed of the unwinding spring (the escapement is also responsible for the ‘ticking’ you can hear as the spring unwinds). By the 1850s however big changes had taken place as new escapements and mass produced Swiss parts made the old verge watches redundant.

But these old watches were not cheap items. In many instances the cases were made from gold or silver and sometimes the owner would have a new mechanism fitted into the case rather than give it up. This was not the norm however and most ended up being either melted down and reused or claimed as collector’s pieces.