Josiah Emery

Josiah Emery was a Swiss-born watchmaker who settled in London and became one of the first makers to produce detached lever watches in meaningful numbers following Thomas Mudge's invention of the escapement in the 1750s, at a time when the wider trade was slow to adopt it. Emery's watches, made in relatively small numbers for a discerning clientele, are among the earliest surviving practical demonstrations that the lever escapement could be manufactured reliably rather than remaining a single inventor's prototype.

Emery was elected to the Society of Arts and is recorded as having exhibited or discussed lever watches in a way that helped keep the mechanism visible to the trade during the decades when it was otherwise neglected in favour of the cheaper verge and cylinder escapements. His role is that of an important early propagator and refiner of Mudge's invention rather than its originator.

Because Emery's total output was small and his surviving signed pieces are correspondingly rare, the documentary record of his individual technical contributions beyond general reputation is thinner than for the escapement's inventor, Mudge, or its later industrial popularisers; this entry reflects that comparative gap.