Watches movements designers - mechanical geniuses
By dint of measuring themselves to the most prestigious watchmaking complications, some watchmakers invent, innovate. Their creations generate functional aesthetics.
By Joel Grandjean
Editor-in-Chief
Originally, the watchmaking complications form part of a practical reality. In front of a useful need, the master watchmaker of the former days racked his brains in order to bring about an answer that made sense in such a small space as first, a pocket watch, then a wristwatch. He grafted new gear trains on a base mechanism, until the timekeeper indicated not only the hours, the minutes or the seconds, but also additional functions. The indications of the date followed by the day of the week are already complications in themselves. Then comes the challenge of going even further, to design a mechanism which jumps from the 30th to the 1st without passing through the 31st, and once a year from the 28th to the 1st, due to the month of February. We are talking about an annual calendar, which, in complexity, precedes the perpetual calendar, which manages to indicate February 29 of leap years every four years. And so on….
While the phases of the moon allowed apprehending the periods most favorable to plowing, the minute-repeater offered the listening of the hour during the night, at an epoch when the ritual of lights out took a certain time. As for the famous tourbillon invented by Abraham Louis Breguet, its aim was to compensate a certain precision fall related to the different positions occupied by a pocket watch during the day.
By putting its regulating organ in a frame which spins around, generally within one minute, he had imagined that he would be able to thwart the laws of gravity. However, the operation requires such an exceptional ability that numerous contemporary disciples tried their hand at it. Beginning with George Daniels, deceased last year, François-Paul Journe, Jean-Claude Nicolet, Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey, Christophe Claret…
At the time when a simple caress of a touch screen makes it possible to obtain the most complete data in terms of hourly appreciation, the watchmaking complications have bartered their programmed disuse for a culture of the celebration of secular know-how kneaded in innovative drives thanks to the resurrection of mechanical horology. The watchmakers of today, guardians of this heritage, have dared their personal interpretations, even written their own partitions, each time revisiting the classic aesthetics. Thus, they are functional designers. As such, the retrograde hand, which, once reaching its terminus comes back to its starting point by an instantaneous jump, frees a new place open to every kind of poetry on the dial.
Jean-Marc Wiederrecht, master of this mechanism by depositing the patent 666.591 in 1986, has first created the Perpetual Calendar Birétrograde for Harry Winston. His most emblematic creations? The Pont des Amoureux for Van Cleef & Arpels and, recently for Hermès, Le Temps Suspendu. A watch which refrains from displaying time when asked and when a timeless moment presents itself: the hands disconnect from their positions as if they had become wild, to find them again as soon as a temporal reality injection is necessary. Put like this, it seems nothing, but this notion of mechanical memory is the concern of the mechanical genius.
MOVEMENT PREPARATORS
They are to horology what Pininfarina is to automobile. Sometimes experimented watchmakers captured by some up-market brand, such as Carole Forestier at Cartier, Grégory Bruttin at Roger Dubuis or Denis Flageollet at de Bethune, such as Mathias Buttet at Hublot, Michel Navas and Barbasini Enrico recently annexed by Louis Vuitton, Kilian Eisenegger at MHVJ or Cédric Granperret at Magma, bought out by Union Horlogère, they have at times created their own businesses to better serve the brands: Christophe Claret, Jean-François Mojon (Chronode), Fabien Lamarche (IMH), Pierre-Laurent Favre (MHC), Philippe Ruedin (ASXP-Engineering) …Others have created their eponymous brand, beginning with Daniel Roth, François-Paul Journe, Philippe Dufour, Sven Andersen, Antoine Preziuso, Thomas Prescher, Peter Speake-Marin, Laurent Ferrier, Ludovic Ballouard, Daniel Nebel de Nord Zeitmaschine or Saskia Maaike-Bouvier…
Watchmaker, more than just a profession
By Joel Grandjean
, Editor-in-Chief
Ever since the revival of mechanical horology, in less than forty years, small hands have become gold fingers, manual activities have been set up as fine...