Feature: 5 mind-blowing watches
I’ve seen a lot of watches in my time. A lot of watches. And some have stuck with me more than others. These are some of the most mind-blowing watches I’ve ever seen. The last one is just—well, you’ll see.
F. P. Journe Tourbillon Souverain
I’ve never met Mr François-Paul Journe, but I can imagine he’s the kind of man who just can’t walk past a wonky picture frame without straightening it. Let me tell you a story. At the tail end of the 18th century, the culmination of two of the greatest minds in watchmaking history, John Arnold and Abraham-Louis Breguet, came to be: the tourbillon.
These guys really were the best of friends. They admired the work of the other so much, they swapped sons as apprentices. John unfortunately died in 1799, and so when Abraham-Louis was finally able to realise a physical version of the tourbillon, he gifted it to John’s son.
Today, the tourbillon continues to exist in acknowledgement of the work of these two great men, even though, really, it serves no purpose anymore. It was developed to work in a pocket watch, negating gravity’s effects by applying the force evenly over the whole. Putting it in a modern wristwatch is a bit like putting a trough at the gas station to feed to horses.
Nevertheless, watchmakers still do it because it’s an incredible, historical achievement, even if it does hang a little wonky on the wall. The flaws are its character, it’s imperfection a bookmark in the pages of history. Not to François-Paul Journe, apparently.
He decided that if a tourbillon deserved to be in his watch, it needed to earn its keep and actually do some useful work. So for the F. P. Journe Tourbillon Souverain, he decided to reorientate the balance within the 42mm platinum case so it would have to fight gravity once more like it did in those pocket watches—just so the tourbillon actually had something to do. That’s like taking the roof off the house to get more use out of an umbrella.
The difficulty with this is that a watch is designed for it to lay flat, both in terms of mechanics and fitment. So there needed to be 90-degree gearing to turn the power around the corner, and a 13.6mm-thick case to fit it all in. No matter—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and so Journe fitted a whacking great 360-degree mirror around the tourbillon so you can see it better.
And if that wasn’t enough, Journe decided to give the Tourbillon Souverain a remontoire system as well, which evens out the diminishing torque of the mainspring for better long-term accuracy. The visual outcome of this is that the second hand in this $300,000 watch ticks like a quartz.
Sugess Tourbillon Master SU8230SW
Speaking of tourbillons, you don’t have to pay $300,000 to get one of these incredible little devices. There are many Swiss watchmakers who’ll make one for you for closer to $50,000, or in the case of the very cheapest Swiss tourbillons, $10,000. Bargain.
Oh yeah, you can also get a genuine, working, not terrible tourbillon watch for $500. TAG Heuer will barely sell you a quartz for that, and I’m talking about a proper, manual wind, mechanical tourbillon for the price of a PlayStation.
What makes a tourbillon such a revered thing to have in a watch? Because it’s as complicated as my relationship with my dad. A mechanical escapement is already a mind-meltingly confusing thing, and then the tourbillon picks the whole lot up and spins it round and round like it’s no big deal. It’s like spinning a basketball on your finger and then you start spinning as well. At best you’ll fall over and hurt yourself. At worst, you’ll create a singularity and end the universe as we know it.
What’s really going to bake your noodle is when you think about what’s mechanically required to make it work. I’m sure you understand the principle of how one gear that’s spinning makes another gear spin. What I want you to think about is if that second gear is sat on a platform that’s already spinning, how that first gear still does its thing.
I can’t figure it out, but the Chinese can, it turns out, because that’s where this Sugess tourbillon comes from. It’s got a Chinese Seagull ST8230 calibre inside, and that’s the thing we’re all here for. I can’t emphasise this enough: this is a genuine tourbillon movement that works reliably for just $500. Mark my words, this is just the beginning of the watchmaking we’re going to see from China.
Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept
The record for the thinnest watch in the world is currently held by the Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari at just 1.75mm thick. That superseded the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Ultra by 0.05mm. Two unbelievable achievements, but naturally compromised by their pursuit of ultimate thinness.
That leaves the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept, at a comparatively porky 2mm thick, still the thinnest watch in the world that’s really a still a normal watch. What do I mean by that? Well, with the Bulgari the crown is split into two for winding and setting and are on their sides rather than in a typical crown orientation. The hour and minute hands, too, are separated onto different dials to fit them both in. And the Richard Mille is like the Jackson Pollock of watchmaking.
By comparison, the Piaget has a normal crown—ish, it’s flattened to fit it within the case, but it still winds like you’d expect, even if Piaget supplies you with a little tool to help you—a normal pair of hands on a normal, if smaller, dial, and it doesn’t look like someone tried to force their watch into a credit card reader. Bonus.
It was no easy feat to achieve such a thing. There was some pretty clever thinking required. For instance, a watch movement is usually built separately and loaded into the rear—steady on—and sealed in with the case back. Not here. The case and case back are one single piece, a monobloc of ultra-tough cobalt alloy that’s unbendable and basically ruined all of Piaget’s machines trying to make it.
It’s also got the fitment for the movement parts already in it, so it becomes the mainplate of the movement as well to save space. So all that is loaded into the front and then sealed in with the crystal. Smart. At least, they thought it was smart until the watch started running way too fast. It was fine without the crystal and went haywire with.
They figured out the balance was running so close to the crystal it was generating a static charge and binding the spring together. They hadn’t thought of it because it was a problem never experienced before in hundreds of years of watchmaking. A nice little anti-static coating on the inside of the crystal and they were good to go.
Corum Bubble Magical 3D Skull
I’m not sure what blows my mind most about the Corum Bubble Magical 3D Skull. Is it the sapphire crystal so heavily domed it can be seen from space? How about the three-dimensional skull sitting beneath said crystal, peering out with an oddly worried expression. Maybe it’s the name, Bubble Magical 3D Skull, that leaves me feeling in utter awe. Or perhaps it’s that people wearing suits working at a Swiss watchmaker looked at this and agreed to make it.
Perhaps it’s not as mad as all that. Maybe it wears a lot smaller in real life. Nope. This watch is 52mm across. There are smaller U-Boats. I mean the watches and the submarines. It is just so damn big. So that means the crystal sits so high it grazes low-flying aircraft. I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t focus the sun and burn a hole through your arm.
And how about that skull? Now, it’s not the first time a skull’s been seen in a wristwatch, but it is the first that it’s been rendered as a topographical map. Despite being almost the same size as an actual human skull, it looks like it was printed on the world’s first 3D printer. The resolution is so poor it makes early YouTube look like IMAX. This effect is no further improved by the massive magnification properties of the monster crystal. I’m still trying to work out if that’s a positive or a negative.
I think it might be the name that really gets me. Corum Bubble Magical 3D Skull. It sounds like a badly translated Halloween costume. And I suppose it kind of is. What have you come as? A lunatic watch collector!
No. The most mind-blowing thing about the Bubble Magical 3D Skull is its very existence. It must have been the day the CEO was off sick and, through a series of wacky events, each wackier and more unbelievable that the last, the intern was left in charge. I can’t think of any other reason for it to be more than the fading memory of a fever dream. And I’m here for it.
A. Lange & Söhne Lange 31 130.025
But perhaps the most mind-blowing watch I’ve seen in a long while is the A. Lange & Söhne Lange 31. It’s a pretty unremarkable-looking watch in the sense that, yes, it seems very well made as you’d expect, but otherwise looks like typical Lange fare.
There’s a big date. A. Lange & Söhne likes those. Makes it nice and easy to read. The hour and minute hand are clear and sharp, like two duelling swords. A sub-second display does its thing at six o’clock, letting you know the watch is running.
And then there’s a power reserve. It’s pretty big as power reserves go. I mean that as in the space it takes up on the dial and the time it lasts for, because look closer and you’ll see the full end of the scale reads “31”. That’s not 31 hours, that’s 31 days. A full 744 hours.
Why? Shut up, that’s why. The real question is why not. And as for how, there’s a mainspring in there that’s nearly two metres long. Actually, there’s two of them. That’s enough mainspring to extend from the front to the back of a BMW Mini.
If you own a manually wound watch, you might be wondering something. When a manual watch is bone dry, winding it is very easy. By the time you get to two, three days, it becomes a bit more of a challenge. Multiply that by ten and you have a mainspring that’s harder to wind than a 100-foot garden hose.
This is A. Lange & Söhne we’re talking about, so whilst it was busy inventing solutions to problems that didn’t exist and thus creating problems that needed solutions that shouldn’t exist, it engineered a winding key that slots directly into the mainspring to top up that mammoth power reserve.
It’s like the most expensive fidget spinner in the world, that key. The design is so deliciously ergonomic and the ratchet mechanism inside so pleasingly satisfying that the whole thing together creates another new problem that no one had anticipated: you have to wait a whole month before you get to enjoy winding it again.
