When an item comes into Brittany Cox?s Seattle-based shop, you can be sure that it is old and it is beautiful. Cox is an antiquarian horologist. She works on watches, clocks, music boxes and other pieces of mechanical magnificence every day, seven days a week. It is an all-consuming passion.
But before she had countless hours of training, received numerous watch and clockmaking certifications and repaired and restored some of the most incredible horological masterpieces, she was a young girl with a fascination in how things worked.
Cox explained her interest in mechanical objects began when she started collecting music boxes and watches as a kid. To Cox, there was something enchanting about discovering a mechanical object that could play music or tell time. It was comforting to see something tangible work like that. ?Having something small that works and does something so special held my attention for many years,? Cox said.
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Cox?s love for seeing how objects worked was inflamed when she went to the University of Texas at San Antonio to study philosophy of metaphysics and epistemology, which looks at what the world is like and what we can know about it. During her studies, she found that the top thinkers of the Renaissance period were looking at how to create artificial intelligence and test the limits of human capacity for creation by what can be made. She learned about all the different ways artisans created th...