Growing Rubies For wrist watch brands

Quartz and battery operated watches are mass produced and many can be very cheap but the art of real mechanical hand crafted watchmaking still exists with some stunningly attractive and accurate examples.
The sky is the limit on the price of some of these and there is currently one manufacturer who regularly sells watches for over four million dollars.
Twenty odd years ago in my job as recycler of component parts from old computers I discovered there was a small company in a Swiss Alpine village that would buy some ruby guide blocks from a few hundred old dot matrix printers we were dismantling.
In a top quality dot matrix printer there is a small red ruby block with up to 24 pin holes in it to guide and control the tiny print pins. The block is a quarter the size of a fingernail so with eight hundred of these in my rucksack I flew to Geneva and caught the train to Lausanne and another to the village.
At twenty eight pounds apiece the day trip was as enjoyable as it was lucrative. Two other points stand out from that trip, the first was being taken to a room where I saw and had explained to me the art of growing synthetic rubies. On a table stood a three foot high blood red ruby tower which had taken months to grow using aluminium oxide and smaller amounts of one or two other elements.
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