Watchmaking

Before even talking about escapements, “free” hairsprings or marketing feats, we need to return to the most vital organ of a mechanical watch—its beating heart. The variable inertia balance is…

Hacking Seconds: The Art of Stopping Time (Just Long Enough to Set It Better) The gesture is familiar to anyone who enjoys setting their watch with near-ceremonial care. You pull…

  The detail that changes everything: where do the seconds go? On a modern watch, the central seconds hand has become so obvious that we barely notice it. It glides,…

The striking watch—and, more specifically, the minute repeater—is one of watchmaking’s most poetic, and most unforgiving, complications. Poetic, because it turns time into music. Unforgiving, because inside the case nothing…

  A dial that plays with depth At first glance, you notice a sense of relief, an almost graphic legibility, as if the numerals and markers had been cut straight…

  You notice them at first glance: that deep blue, sometimes almost electric, that catches the light and shifts in tone depending on the angle. It immediately conjures up a…

  What exactly is a regulator watch? A regulator watch is a watch whose display separates the indications of time: most often, the minutes take centre stage, while the hours…

  The micro-rotor: the mechanical elegance of the invisible For many, an automatic watch is that half-disc of metal spinning freely on the back of the movement, capturing the wrist’s…

  The mechanical watch’s “fuel gauge” On a mechanical watch, the power-reserve indicator has something deliciously human about it: it lets you see the mainspring’s impending fatigue, the end of…

  A tiny detail, an outsized signature In the watchmaking world, some complications are very “visible”: multi-register chronographs, perpetual calendars, tourbillons spinning like mechanical jewels. But there are also more…

I remember my first encounter with an “ultra-thin.” I’m talking, of course, about an “ultra-thin watch” (what were you thinking?). Among these marvels of slenderness, a hand-wound watch truly defies…

  A Different Way to Read Time In the collective imagination, a “classic” watch tells the time with hands: one for the hours, another for the minutes, sometimes a seconds…