ithout this hand — which has evolved into the ultimate tool, as capable of picking up a tiny crumb as hurling a rock, of sculpting, digging, planting or caressing —, without it, the incredible, marvellous, bloody human adventure would never have existed (or at least, not as we know it). The hand has shaped our entire history and transformed our planet.

Without it, we would never have walked upright. Without it, our brain would never have developed as it has. The hand connects us as humans. It is the organ with the most direct pathways to the brain. By far.

Penfield’s homunculus shows this in pictorial form. A well-known representation of the sensitivity of different parts of the human anatomy (a man’s), it was devised in the 1930s by Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon at the Royal Victoria Hospital at McGill University in Montreal.

Penfield’s homunculus is a visual representation of the connections between the brain and different parts of the human anatomy. The hands, tongue and lips have the most connections, hence are disproportionately large.

He mapped the functions of the cerebral cortex by electrically stimulating different regions of his patients’ bodies. Though challenged by contemporary science, this evocative model remains, broadly speaking, an accurate representation of human sensitivity. As we can see, the hands – along with the tongue and the lips – are the organs which most directly connect the outside world and our brain.

Hands Magazine

The report in our latest issue is a foretaste of what readers can expect to find in our future magazine, dedicated to the hand in its many guises. It will, of course, place particular emphasis on craftsmanship and the “intelligence of the hand” at work, reflecting the revival of artisanship in all its forms, from the most modest to the most spectacular.

Beyond craftsmanship, content will explore the many aspects of the hand, in terms of its history, its age-old connection with art, physiology, palaeontology, philosophy, sociology, beauty, the future and more.

But we begin here with the subject closest to us, watchmaking, and specifically the role of the hand in watchmaking.

Artist’s impression of a hominid, seemingly captivated by his opposable thumb, the tool with which other tools, such as the flint in his left hand, are made.

We meet the farmer-watchmaker, today part of the romance of horology but a very real figure, nonetheless. From the plate he ate from and the food in it to the bed he slept in, everything in the farmer-watchmaker’s environment was made by hand. Whatever he needed, he would make himself. Manual skill was a fact of life. Then came mechanisation.

The wheel turns. The hand serves the machine but a legacy lives on, and a new generation is reviving the fortunes of the hand-crafted watch.

Browsing these pages, we visit a workshop which for decades lay forgotten, frozen in time; we are reminded that the hand can have a darker side, with a First World War prosthetic arm; we hear the thoughts of a master watchmaker on “what the hand knows” and explore the transformation of the mechanical hand, from Jaquet-Droz to the exoskeleton.

There is more. We document the rising tide of hand-finishing and consider the infinite subtleties of hand-chamfering, ending with the younger generations who are driving the resurgence in interest in hand-crafted.