A Patek Philippe “Dashboard” Clock Goes Under The Hammer For Only Watch 2021

Many, many of the top wristwatch brands also have an equally illustrious history of creating marvelous, large-format clocks and time-tellers; and Patek Philippe is arguably unrivaled in this arena. While much of the attention is often drawn to the maker’s intricate, bell-jar-covered table-top mechanisms – for this year’s charity Only Watch auction, a biennial timepiece event presented under the patronage of HSH Prince Albert of Monaco to benefit Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy research, Patek Philippe is offering a desktop clock inspired by jazz-age industrialism, with a strong dose of American automotive history to boot.

The reference 27001M-001 desktop clock features a perpetual calendar complication and 31-days of power reserve, and pulls together a total of nine new patents in its mechanisms. But, more to the point, it is inspired by a desktop clock commissioned by American automotive tycoon, James Ward Packard, in 1922/23, that is conserved in the watchmaker’s museum in Geneva.
 

James Ward Packard, along with his brother, William Doud Packard, took their handmade, single-cylinder “horseless carriage” buggy experiment built in their Ohio garage in 1899 and grew a company that became an American automotive behemoth. Many aficionados of classic cars consider the last true Packard that rolled off the assembly line in Detroit in 1956 to be the last great American luxury car. As it turns out, James Ward Packard was also a keen and loyal customer of Patek Philippe.

The watchmaker’s designers and engineers were tasked with modernizing the Packard desktop “dashboard,” creating a wholly-new, manually-wound movement with a whopping 31-days of power reserve, constant-force mechanism, and accuracy of +/- 1 seconds per day. The development of the rectangular, 919-part 86-135 PEND IRM Q SE calibre also took seven years of effort.
 

Still, jazz-age flourishes and functions abound. From the ornate, gold-gilded footings and decorations to the sculptured, silver framing, to the finely-grained American walnut veneer, the clock screams robber baron gravitas. The gilt “The Only One” badging on the front-facing panel underlines this clock’s relationship with the charity auction, as well as its uniqueness.
 

The numbering and gauging on the clock’s vintage-feeling opaline dial appear to be almost hand-drafted (a typeface you can find in the Patek Philippe Calatrava reference 5212A-001 that debuted in 2019), but one of the more unique features is the red-framed weekly calendar along the outer ring of the clock’s face (this heritage function was also explored in the aforementioned Calatrava reference). The weekly cycle was particularly important during the industrial age (as in, “we have 44 weeks to design, tool, promote, and begin production on this new car model!”), but this unique function would be as useful as it is charming for any modern-day mover-and-shaker.