Antoine Thiout

Antoine Thiout, known as Thiout l'aîné, was clockmaker to the Duke of Orléans. His two-volume Traité de l'horlogerie méchanique et pratique (1741), with nearly a hundred engraved plates, describes the tools, lathes and wheel-cutting engines of the trade as well as repeating work, equation clocks and other mechanisms, and it is a principal source for how French clocks and watches were made in the mid-18th century.

Thiout's plates are among the clearest records of 18th-century workshop practice: wheel-cutting engines, fusee engines, turns and lathes, as well as the layout of repeating and equation work. Historians and restorers still use them to understand how parts were made and adjusted.

His treatise belongs with the works of Jean-André Lepaute, Ferdinand Berthoud and the Le Roy family that made Paris a centre of horological publishing during the Enlightenment.

The second volume covers repeating work, alarms, equation work and astronomical indications, and Thiout credits many of the designs to the Paris makers who devised them, so the book also records who was inventing what in the 1730s. Its engraved plates have been reproduced in modern facsimiles and remain a standard reference for restorers of French clocks of the period.