Geneva: a journey between clocks, Dr. Frankenstein, atoms and fondues

Geneva welcomes us with rain.

We left our bags at the Bristol hotel, located a few meters from the shores of Lake Geneva, and without wasting time we got on one of the small boats that it leaves on the opposite shore, at the foot of the Cologne hill.

An ascending walk of about 15 minutes —which little by little discovers the wonderful views of the Swiss city— takes us to the gates of the Bodmer foundation.

The Bodmer Foundation is the legacy of Martin Bodmer, a Swiss philanthropist who dedicated an entire palace to exhibiting his collection of incunabula, manuscripts and first editions of universal literature, from Homer to Goethe, including a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and sheet music. handwritten by Mozart.

Hall of the 'War and Peace' exhibition, inaugurated in 2019 at the Bodmer Foundation in Geneva.

FABRICE COFFRINI (AFP via Getty Images)

His obsession was to be as close as possible to the moment in which human knowledge is born and develops.

Some time ago, the guide explains, the foundation set up an exhibition dedicated to Mary Shelley with handwritten texts and first editions of her

From her.

The house in which the work was conceived, the melancholic Villa Diodati, is in fact about a ten minute walk away.

Engraving of Villa Diodati, the estate on the outskirts of Geneva where Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori and Percy B. Shelley met in the cold summer of 1816 to tell horror stories.

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It was there that, in the cold summer of 1816, the British author met with Lord Byron, Percy B. Shelley and the doctor John Polidori to narrate the horror stories that gave rise to the work that, according to some, inaugurated the genre of horror. science fiction and which reveals Shelley's concern for the enthusiasm with which the world faced the rise of science and technology.

If you want to understand the context, you should visit the Science Museum in Geneva, recommends our guide.

Statue in Geneva dedicated to Frankenstein's monster, the creature from the famous horror novel by Mary Shelley.

FABRICE COFFRINI (AFP via Getty Images)

We cross the lake again in the direction of the aforementioned museum.

In the Mon Repos park is the Villa Bartholoni, the palace that houses it and that the prosperous local Protestant families donated to the city to record the way in which their ancestors contributed to the development of knowledge.

Their generous financial means, combined with the art of watchmaking, made it possible to build locally the instruments that promoted the advancement of science.

Along with the entire arsenal of barometers, telescopes and chronometers displayed in its showcases, it exhibits the first battery in which the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) managed to store energy.

In addition to endowing an endless number of mechanisms with autonomy, the invention of the battery gave wings to the first medical attempts to revive corpses using electric shocks,

And what do watches have to do with all this?

Sitting on the wonderful terrace of the restaurant La perle du Lac, Stéphane Fischer, curator of the museum, explains it to us: by banning jewelry because it represents the exacerbation of luxury, John Calvin unknowingly encouraged the development of the watchmaking industry.

The local goldsmiths had to reinvent themselves by learning the trade from the French Huguenot watchmakers who arrived to escape the religious persecutions they were victims of in their country.

When the desire for knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment movement required instruments that would make scientific measurements possible, the precision art of master watchmakers provided the ability to create such mechanisms without having to import them from other countries.

The telescopes themselves, for example,

They are closely related to the measurement of time, since to give the exact time to the first clocks it was necessary to be guided by the movement of the stars.

The installation of the first observatory in Geneva was authorized on the condition that it gave the time to the master watchmakers every day.

Some time later, that same observatory was in charge of organizing the contest that rewarded the best and most precise manufacturer of chronometers.

Along with sextants, chronometers were essential in the exploration of the planet, since they allowed navigators to know their position in the middle of the ocean.

The installation of the first observatory in Geneva was authorized on the condition that it gave the time to the master watchmakers every day.

Some time later, that same observatory was in charge of organizing the contest that rewarded the best and most precise manufacturer of chronometers.

Along with sextants, chronometers were essential in the exploration of the planet, since they allowed navigators to know their position in the middle of the ocean.

The installation of the first observatory in Geneva was authorized on the condition that it gave the time to the master watchmakers every day.

Some time later, that same observatory was in charge of organizing the contest that rewarded the best and most precise manufacturer of chronometers.

Along with sextants, chronometers were essential in the exploration of the planet, since they allowed navigators to know their position in the middle of the ocean.

The largest watchmaking museum in the world in the village of La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Swiss canton of Neuchatel.Alamy Stock Photo

In their eagerness to understand how things work, watchmakers came to build complicated automatons that made us fantasize about the creation of artificial life by humans.

A different path than the one imagined by the doctors on whom Mary Shelley based her work, but one that was guided by the same enthusiasm.

On the recommendation of Stéphane Fischer himself, we traveled to the city of Neuchâtel —some 120 kilometers north of Geneva— to see these automata in action at the Museum of Art and History.

And from there to the nearby watchmaking town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, a little further north, where you can learn about the genesis of the Swiss watch industry: the farms that raised cattle in summer and manufactured parts and gears in winter.

In addition to containing the largest watchmaking museum in the world,

From the restaurant to the laboratory

'Wandering through the immeasurable', a steel sculpture by artist Gayle Hermick at CERN in Geneva.

Shaped like a loop, it represents the great discoveries of physics.

Alamy Stock Photo

We returned to Geneva the next day.

After visiting the statue dedicated to the creature of Dr. Frankenstein and taking a walk through the wonderful old town, we had a fondue dinner at the restaurant Les Armures, one of the historic ones in the city.

Discussing with the meter the journey that took us from the birth of Frankenstein to the watchmaking towns of the Jura massif, he tells us that if what interests us are time measurement mechanisms, we cannot leave without visiting the CERN facilities, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

Our friend was not wrong.

After all, its Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-circumference ring that in 2012 confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson,

it represents the largest artifact ever created to try to understand the structure of space-time.

But that, of course, is a topic for another story.

Javier Argüello

is the author of

 (Random House Literature, 2021).

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