Hi MTF,
Congratulations on a most comprehensive and enjoyable read.
An excellent report on email and obviously very thoroughly researched.
I was particularly pleased to see you make public the little known comparison between email and E-mail.
Your article brought back memories for me, and as I have often wondered if your Koala indicates a tie with Australia...... you or other Australians might remember a company that I worked for, in Orange, New South Wales some 35 years ago.
It was called Email Pty Ltd.... and basically did exactly that.
My job was in the email department.... no not 'communication' as you already and rightly have pointed out... but in the enamel department.
My principal job was in applying the powder and later firing the work, although I also worked in the milling and filtering sections.
Milling was the crushing of the glass to form the powder.
Here we ground the glass in large tumblers with massive balls and then went through the process of cleaning the resultant powder.
It was heat dried and as you mention stored in distilled water and when used, needed constant stirring during any spray application as the powder had a tendency to sink.
After application it was seriously heat dried, as moisture during firing could give disastrous results, as could oil or grease on the principal base.
I sometimes used to think that there were as many 'Foreigners' done at Email P/L as company jobs. ( 'A Foreigner' was the name given by staff to work being done by staff, for staff.... without Company Management knowledge, and these jobs ranged through everything imaginable from jewelry to belt-buckles to whatever.
These foreigners mostly needed the cooperation of other staff and there was always a flurry when management approached to put the foreigners out of sight.
It is worth noting, that while email / enamel is considered a rare item today, back in the 1950s to 1970s it was a household item, used on every imaginable commodity.
Souvenirs, school and sporting badges, cigarette lighters, ashtrays, car badges,kitchen and household item from pots and pans to dinner plates, and everything imaginable.
Sure it was not as good as some expectations in todays watches..... but it was right up there if the product demanded it. .... Mercedes Benz badges of the 1950 -1960s were still filled with a beautiful cobalt blue email, and if you buy one for a vintage Benz today... you will get a brand new badge, still done in email... and of extremely good quality.... but not of the quality of yesteryear for I have replaced exactly one and compared both.
Regarding failures, the successful firing rate was very high at almost 100%.... and while I think the standard of the email in the watches you have presented in this report are constructed to the demands of utmost scrutiny,..... I do know it is also in the watch makers interest to talk up the failure rate of email.
But in general the only failures we endured were oil or grease contamination which left a hole exposing the principal base where the email did not stick.... or a power failure which allowed an oven temperature drop.
A common trick was to put a sweaty fingerprint on a principal base and apply powder and then fire it.
Many times it would result in a perfect reproduction of ones fingerprint... with little minute globules of glass beads forming the print lines.
We kept the firing ovens at 1,300 Deg. F, or about 705 Deg. C.
These were very beneficial on some nights as Orange is relatively above mean sea level and gets cold at night.
One memory your article brought back was of many of us huddling around an oven one night that I worked the Midnight shift.
It was Snowing.... and while that was not entirely unusual for Orange... the date was December 23rd ... 2 days before Christmas... and the middle of our summer.... and probably in 1974.
I have a passion for email and so thank you for a great article and it is good to see Paiget's beautiful work.
I would love to see a return to more email in many watch brands.... and I think it will come.
kindest regards,
Jack