George Daniels was born in 1926 in Sunderland, England, and was largely self-taught as a watchmaker, having had no formal training beyond a brief apprenticeship in his teens. He began repairing watches commercially in London in the late 1940s and by the 1960s had developed an international reputation as the finest restorer of antique pocket watches in the world. His knowledge of horological history was encyclopaedic, and his 1975 book Watchmaking — still in print — remains the most comprehensive English-language manual of traditional watchmaking techniques ever written.

Daniels' principal technical legacy is the co-axial escapement, which he developed between 1974 and 1980 as a solution to the fundamental problem of the lever escapement: that the sliding friction between the pallet jewels and the escape wheel teeth requires lubrication that degrades with time, causing rate instability and necessitating regular service. The co-axial escapement largely eliminates this sliding friction through a different geometry of impulse delivery, theoretically extending service intervals significantly. After being rejected by every major Swiss manufacturer to whom he presented it, the escapement was finally adopted by Omega in 1999 — a vindication that Daniels described as arriving twenty years late.

Alongside this theoretical work, Daniels hand-made approximately thirty complete pocket watches during his lifetime, each made entirely by one person from raw materials — an achievement without parallel in twentieth-century watchmaking. Several are held in museum collections; others have sold at auction for prices exceeding £1 million. Daniels was appointed MBE and later OBE for services to horology, received the Freedom of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He died in 2011 on the Isle of Man, having spent his final years working with his designated successor, Roger W. Smith.