Six IAMWATCH 2026 Lectures Worth Building Your Schedule Around

IAMWATCH 2026 isn’t just a place to handle watches and meet their makers.

Across the public days from 13 to 15 November, the programme also gives serious enthusiasts a reason to sit down and listen, with six lectures that trace precision watchmaking from observatory trials to the co-axial escapement.

Held in the Wonder Room at The Singapore EDITION, the talks bring together Carlos Torres, Andreas Strehler, Roger W. Smith and Rémy Cools for a compact but unusually focused horological syllabus.

At a glance

• IAMWATCH 2026 will host six public lectures from 13 to 15 November in Singapore.
• The programme covers observatory competitions, régleurs, French precision horology, George Daniels and the co-axial escapement.
• All six lectures take place in the Wonder Room at The Singapore EDITION, with registration and full programme details available via iamwatch.com.

Precision as a competitive pursuit

The opening lecture on Friday, 13 November, puts the old observatory competitions back into context.

In The Precision Olympics: The Observatory Competitions and the Making of Horological Prestige, Carlos Torres, Founder of The Ministry of Horological Affairs, examines the chronometer trials held between the 1860s and 1960s.

The subject matters because those competitions did more than reward accuracy.

Their rules, results and reputations helped shape how makers were judged, and how precision became a form of prestige.

Torres returns on Saturday morning with Régleurs: Watchmaking’s Invisible Masters of Precision, a lecture devoted to the specialists who adjusted balances and hairsprings for competition-level performance.

It’s a useful corrective to the usual dial-centric reading of watch history, where the visible name often obscures the hands that made a movement perform.

Tradition viewed through working watchmakers

Independent watchmaker Andreas Strehler takes the Friday midday slot with Standing on Tradition – The Historical Development of Innovation in Watchmaking.

His lecture looks at how craft knowledge is inherited, tested and changed, rather than treating tradition as something static.

That framing suits IAMWATCH’s broader appeal to collectors who care about the bench as much as the brand.

For anyone interested in independent watchmaking, Strehler’s talk should be one of the more practical meditations on how old methods survive by being reconsidered.

On Sunday morning, young French watchmaker Rémy Cools turns to 18th & 19th Century French Precision Horology.

The lecture focuses on the watchmakers and technical developments of the period, as well as the ways historical French precision horology continues to inform contemporary work at the bench.

George Daniels and the co-axial story

Roger W. Smith anchors two of the weekend’s most closely watched sessions.

On Saturday afternoon, Life & Times of George Daniels considers Daniels through the watches he left behind, looking at what those pieces reveal about his methods and ideas.

Smith worked alongside Daniels, which gives the subject a rare closeness without needing to turn the lecture into simple reminiscence.

On Sunday, Smith returns with The Co-Axial – From Idea to Reality, tracing the development of Daniels’ co-axial escapement from concept toward series production.

The draw here is not simply the invention itself, but the persistence and practical difficulty involved in making a mechanical idea work beyond the prototype stage.

IAMWATCH 2026 lecture schedule

All six sessions will be held in the Wonder Room at The Singapore EDITION.

For collectors, students of watchmaking and anyone who wants more than a quick wrist shot from the weekend, the lecture programme looks like one of IAMWATCH 2026’s most rewarding uses of time.