So my day obviously took place in chronological order, but it would be ludicrous for me to try and tell you about it in that format. You’ll just have to trust me and stay with me while I take you through the past and present of H Moser & Cie as I remember it. Okay?

Cool.

To be fair, though, when I first got to know about H Moser & Cie, they hadn’t yet introduced the Venturer. This collection, with its narrow bezel, domed crystal and slender lugs, debuted in 2014, and quite frankly it attracted me from the very first. Its most characteristic, stripped-down iteration possesses a taut, lean beauty — angled convex fumé dial, textured countersunk small-seconds subdial, baton markers, elongated leaf-shaped hands with tapered profiles and just the very slightest curve to their upper surfaces. (Sorry about all the breathless detail; I got a bit carried away there.)

Roaming around the Moser manufacturing facility in Neuhausen, one of the things that strikes you the most is the youth — or rather, I should say the youthful energy — of everyone you come across. This is not to be confused with the high-octane exuberance that draws the hordes of brash Bilzerian Bros. The workshops of H Moser & Cie may be modest in size, but the professional dedication that drives the modern ambition of the watches created in these rooms is anything but.

In January this year, Moser debuted the Swiss Alp watch, an enormously enjoyable piece that neatly punctured our current obsession with connected personal devices. The Moser-produced video that accompanied its launch is a prime example of how CEO Edouard Meylan has encouraged the brand to embrace digital media in a way that other traditional companies have resisted doing.

Here’s the thing, though — if Moser are able to position their watches with confidence in 2016, it’s only because they’ve been making the things for so damn long.

After his induction into the trade via an apprenticeship under his father, Heinrich Moser went west to Le Locle in 1824. Along with the neighbouring La Chaux-de-Fonds, Le Locle was already by that time a major centre of Swiss watchmaking. Watchmaking was so much a part of this area that civic authorities reshaped both La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle to facilitate the needs of the watchmaking industry. I’m not even kidding about this. After a massive fire that razed La Chaux-de-Fonds to the ground in 1794, the city was rebuilt in a logistically efficient grid layout, with street widths carefully calculated in order to allow the maximum amount of sunlight into the windows of watchmaking workshops. Le Locle followed suit after their own town-wide conflagration in 1833.

Within two years, Heinrich Moser had gained such watchmaking skill that he outshone his master in Le Locle and started taking apprentices of his own. Hearing of opportunities to further his career in St Petersburg, he travelled there in 1928 and established a living in that great city. He returned to Switzerland in 1848 with his fortune made, his entrepreneurial spirit invigorated by his experience in Russia, and immediately set about revitalising the depressed economy of Schaffhausen — the dam harnessing the power of the Rhine was a particular project of his.

Visiting the Moser Museum is a bit of a trip — you feel as if you’ve literally stepped back into Heinrich Moser’s family home. The entrance hall is still liberally studded all around with 19^th-century hunting trophies — you see representatives of the ibex family, chamois, red deer, one lone snarling bear. One of the rooms on the upper level has been turned into a recreation of Heinrich Moser’s private watchmaking studio, containing shelves and cabinets lined with archival watches and instruments, a workbench laden with horological apparatus and artefacts of Heinrich Moser’s travels.

A travelling trunk piled high with replicas of Heinrich Moser’s personal and business papers sits next to the glazed fireplace, while a stuffed toy dog is the key to an anecdote drawn from Moser’s extensive family correspondence that provides a beautifully vivid glimpse into his inner life. The curator of the Moser Museum, Mandy Ranneberg, described to me the long journey that Heinrich Moser took to reach St Petersburg, and his acute dismay and subsequent depression upon leaving Frankfurt when a peasant stole his faithful poodle as it was running behind his coach. Moser was unable to stop the coach and the thief got away with the beloved dog. (“That asshole!” I gasped, and Mandy nodded grimly.)

It feels strange to call it a museum, as if it were nothing more than a collection of old objects. The Moser Museum is maintained with as much affection as if the family were still resident on the premises. In a sense, they are. Across the hall from the family room, which adjoins the watchmaking studio, a richly appointed room represents the life of Heinrich Moser’s son, also named Heinrich (but called Henri), and his efforts to expand the family business into the Near East. Personal effects, photographs and journals lie around the room.

The narrative of Moser’s family unfolds (scandalous marriages, Communist sympathisers, domestic estrangement) and you almost forget that you were initially drawn here by your interest in watches. But I have to admit that I wasn’t displeased about being led off the path of watchmaking discovery; I found that behind the watch story was an incredibly moving human story.

Here in the Moser Museum, they’re renovating the wings of the villa, including the gallery where the estate’s art is usually displayed. From the grounds you can look across the city and see the Rhine, where Moser built his hydro-electric dam. The renewed activity that the dam brought to Schaffhausen was a prime factor in its industrial growth in the latter half of the 19^th century, attracting an American businessman named Florentine Ariosto Jones who, with the help and advice of Heinrich Moser, subsequently set up his own watch company in the city.

If you’re familiar with the internal product narrative of H Moser & Cie, you’ll probably realise I’m talking about the watch collections out of sequence. The collections are linked to different stages of Heinrich Moser’s life, so I should have started with the Endeavour collection and then gone on to the Venturer. That’s one way of looking at it — a strong, conventional way, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But this is not your conventional manufacture story. Neither is H Moser & Cie your conventional watch company.

The H Moser & Cie manufacture in Neuhausen is located in a little industrial park, surrounded by greenery. Its immediate neighbours are not from the watchmaking industry. This is in pretty sharp distinction to most other watch companies that are based in Francophone Switzerland and concentrated in the same handful of places.

The vast majority of regulators in the Swiss watch industry are made by one specialist company located in Villeret. This expertise is really hard to come by; we’re not even kidding about this. If you’re a watch company that makes its own hairsprings and balance wheels, it’s a BFD.

I’ve visited two other hairspring facilities — Rolex and Nivarox. (Well, actually I’ve visited five, but I wasn’t allowed to view the hairspring workshops in three of them.) Why is it hairspring expertise so difficult to acquire and why are people so secretive about it? I mean, it’s just a bunch of really small wire spirals, right?

The specific alloy used in the proprietary Straumann hairsprings made here in Neuhausen is called PE4000 and is a complex formula developed by the team headed by Dominique Lauper at Precision Engineering. I spoke with Dominique Lauper at this most recent Baselworld and honestly this guy is a goldmine of information on materials science. You might not imagine that this extremely specific area of expertise would have that much bearing on high watchmaking, but holy crap you would be so wrong.

It should be clear to you by now that making hairsprings is one of those things that is simple in theory but extremely difficult in execution. Anyone with the right machinery can make hairsprings, but very few people can make hairsprings to the correct specifications and levels of performance needed in a mechanical watch. This is work that demands focus and unremitting perfectionism, qualities that do not naturally occur in human behaviour except when directed at activities involving Pringles and an Xbox (in my experience anyway). Would I ever be able to work in the hairspring facility at PEAG? There was this extremely obliging and patient young man who showed me around the workshop, and when I asked him if there was any task in the hairspring manufacture process that could be accomplished by a hungover person, he looked at me with such horror in his eyes that I was obliged to pretend it was a (very bad) joke.

As if having a magical hairspring-producing workshop in the basement wasn’t enough, H Moser & Cie are continually hard at work trying to create new and innovative mechanisms to inhabit their watches. The Moser big date, for example, that provides a straightforward and intuitive alternative to other existing date indications (tiny date wheel, energy-sucking double-wheel big date, hard-to-read pointer). Or their double-pull crown, which simplifies the process of getting the crown to the correct position for setting the time or date. Their modular escapement and their modular tourbillon impart several practical advantages to the servicing and maintenance of H Moser & Cie watches — and if you’re any kind of watch collector you’ll appreciate the attention paid to after-sales issues.

All this I realised after spending just one day with H Moser & Cie. I could easily have spent far more. Those of you out there who wear one of their watches, is this what it’s like every day, spending time with Moser? Tell me, how does it feel?

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