Why the Winding Key Is Left Handed
A small perversity in the standard, and the reason it stays.
Every winding key we cut is left handed. This is not whimsy. Ambrose Halloway set the standard in 1911 after a visiting collector, winding a borrowed model with a common key from his coat pocket, stripped the great wheel of the Meridian No. 3 that stood in the shop window.
A left-hand square keeps any key but ours from seating. It is a small lock built from geometry, and it has saved more great wheels than any guard we could have bolted on. Collectors learn it once and never lose the habit; new owners write to us, once, with a gently exasperated letter, and we send the key and the story together.
There is a second reason that matters more. A left-hand winding slows the hand down. You cannot hurry it, and an owner who cannot hurry a winding is an owner who feels the train engage, tooth by tooth, and stops when the fusee is full rather than when the key slips. The perversity is the teacher.
We cut every key on the same machine Ambrose bought, a small screwing stock bolted to the bench by the window, and we have turned away three offers for it. Some standards are worth the inconvenience. That is rather the point of standards.