I wish watch brands would release real photos along with their Computer renderings. Though it is likely the real watch isn't even completed when you first see them as CAD (above).
Until then, I gotta rely on fellow bloggers like these from ProfessionalWatches who shared this video and shots of the one of eleven HD3 Bi-Axial Tourbillons ($400,000) from the SIHH show in Geneva earlier this month.
A former concept watch called the Vulcania has become flesh and bone. Designed by Fabrice Gonet for the three year old brand HD3 Complication. A trio-collective started by Jorg Hysek where he, Gonet and Valerie Ursenbacher design watches from their wildest imaginations.
The Vulcania name derives from the Jules Verne Steampunk hero, Captain Nemo and the island which was his home port. Like many of his contemporaries, Gonet has deconstructed the watch with its functions in a deeply set three-dimensional display, separating each gauge as a tribute to vintage naval technology both fictional (Nautilus) and fact (Turn-of-the-century mechanical submarines). The hours are determined from the rotating wheel cylinders on the left, the minutes on a disc like a ship's Chadburn Telegraph, a sextant style power reserve indicator, porthole loupe date window, and highlighted by the tilted bi-axial tourbillon. All the watch functions can be seen through its front and rear sapphire glass panels, side-viewing porthole, and the back plate has an etched map with its coordinates engraved on it. The case is titanium and platinum.
I've been pacing like an expecting father for this baby to come out! So pass out the cigars to the lucky few - and by few, I mean only 11 Vulcania will be made. The coming out party will be in Geneva Switzerland at the SIHH (Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie) in April. The price? If you have to ask...
Bell & Ross BR01 Instrument Blue, Orange & all black Phantom-->Link
Related new-release posts; DeBethune-->Link Greubel Forsey-->Link Opus 7-->Link Sarpaneva Supernova-->Link Hautlence-->Link HD3 Vulcania-->Link Bell & Ross Tourbillon-->Link
A perfect watch for hunting giant squid, Moby Dick or the Loch Ness Monster. The Arnold & Son True North Perpetual, the top tier model by the recently reanimated 220 year old brand. Featuring a manually wound A&S caliber 1794 movement, perpetual calendar (date, month, moonphase, leap year), double equation of time, true solar time, true direction, longitude, and power reserve. All that's missing is a barometer, armillary, sextant, and telescope.
By now, many are aware of BNB Concept and their work – after all, it was only a matter of time before people started to wonder where the likes of Romain Jerome, De Witt, Hublot, Concord, Jacob & Co. and Bell & Ross acquired their blisteringly innovative tourbillons all of a sudden. Jorg Hysek’s HD3 visionaries were the only ones to freely admit the origins of their gothic-tech complications from the start, but once people started spotting BNB’s trademark spiral-spoked escape wheel all over the place, the cat was out of the bag. Once was a time when people were reluctant to reveal the minds behind their rent-a-calibres – now everyone's falling over themselves to get a piece of the BNB action and the instant provenance it brings. As BNB attests:
“BNB wishes not to become a new watch brand, but rather a label of quality. Should BNB create its own brand, it would inevitably become a competitor to its customers.”
Unlike Renaud & Papi's selective austerity or Christophe Claret's mercenary dictatorship, BNB is a genuinely cool, relaxed community of eager young things with genuinely new ideas about how watches should work – with no less than five facilities in Duillier, Crans-près-Céligny, La Vallée de Joux, La Chaux-de-Fonds and Nyon at their disposal, all crammed full of the latest tools, CNC machines, electroplating and engraving machines, and rank-upon-rank of sterile assembly lines. What’s doubly impressive about BNB is that they make complete WATCHES for their 25-or-so clients – not just the multi-plane/dual-axis tourbillon movements they’re famous for. For a five-year-old outfit, that’s serious progress.
Members of the Confrérie Horlogere 2008-2009 and Mathias Buttet (CEO and founder BNB Concept ; founder Confrérie Horlogère).
From the left: David Rodriguez, Ranieri Illicher, Clara Bise, Mathias Buttet, Ken Koshiyama, Sabitry Montandon, Gabriel Salgado-de Arce, Brigitte Carneiro.
It was therefore inevitable, despite the abovementioned pledge, that as a fully verticalized entity, BNB would eventually indulge in its own vanity projects – albeit under an alternative banner, "Confrérie Horlogère". (Perhaps reminiscent of Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey’s Complitime factory, which bankrolled proceedings before they unleashed their eponymous double tourbillon).
Confrérie Horlogère is a bit Opus, a bit Maitres du Temps, a bit Time Aeon – only the emphasis is on nurturing youngsters with ideas beyond their usual means. And in this first year, no less than seven talents and four almost-complete watches have been put on pedestals by BNB’s effusive CEO Matthias Buttet (one of the "B"s in BNB - the others being Barbasini and Navas, all of them formerly of Franck Muller’s Watchland - Buttet as a micro-technical engineer, Navas and Barbasini as prototypists).
In Buttet’s words:
“The Confrérie Horlogère, far from being a product, is an ambitious project to promote such values as work, creativeness, craftsmanship, community spirit, respect and above all freedom of women and men moved by the will to express themselves through excellence, as well as unexpected design.”
And I’m pleased to report that every one of Buttet’s fresh-faced prodigies have come up with equally amazing movements and watches... It really is quite incredible to see such a tranche of brilliance emerge all at once.
Every year, Confrérie Horlogère will select a maximum of 7 “graduates” to develop their own watch, produced on a very small-scale – no more than 10 pieces each. And unlike many flash-in-the-pan pantomime projects, which run the danger of costing more to fix and service over a lifetime than the watch itself (if indeed you find a capable-enough and willing watchmaker in the first place, once the flash-in-the-pan brand has gone belly-up) the CH timepieces will benefit from a lifetime’s guarantee. Buttet trusts his kids that much.
This year’s 7 “companions” are:
1. David Rodriguez, a Peruvian watchmaker, whose “la Résilience” tourbillon demonstrates sublimely anarchic finishing with Punk overtones that actually reveal through its scars and stitching the difficulties Rodriguez faced as an abused orphan on crutches who, finally, found in Switzerland and watchmaking a refuge. Metaphorically biographical watchmaking – surely a world first?
la Résilience
2. Brigitte Carneiro, watchmaker, with “la Face Cachée”
la Face Cachée
3. Ken Koshiyama, watchmaker, with “Racines japonaises”
4. Ranieri Illicher, watchmaker, whose la Passion à l’italienne micro-brand debuts with the “Bel Canto” minute repeater tourbillon – a chiming watch literally suspended in a bell, which also serves as the watch case – why didn’t anyone think of this before?!
Bel Canto Minute Repeater (thanks to DonCorson Watchprosite.com)
5. Sabitry Montandon, watchmaker
6. Clara Bise, watchmaker
7. Gabriel Salgado de Arce, engraver and chaser of watch components, whose coral reef ImmenSEAty just defies all watch-finishing convention. Words can’t do this justice.
ImmenSEAty
8. An eighth Companion has already been selected for the year 2009- 2010. His name is Jérôme Siegrist, a watchmaker who is already involved in an ambitious project that focuses on recreating and scaling down to wristwatch dimensions an extremely complex mechanism built, anachronistically, two centuries B.C. and salvaged from a shipwreck in 1901. Antikythera will be presented by the end of 2009, but you can get an inkling of what to expect-->here.
The ANTIKYTHERA mechanism wristwatch concept
Beside these individual “Complications” watches, the Companions will all be collaborating on joint Confrerie Horlogère projects, either as small-series “Classiques” or one-off “Masters” pieces. So far, there’s Masters Clef du Temps – an ornately skeletonised vertical tourbillon movement (presumably derived from the one developed for Concord, but as usual completely original and unlike anything seen before) – and Classiques Chronographe Tourbillon Pulsion 1 (I’ve run out of superlatives….)
The Confrérie Horlogère’s Only Watch 09 (by BNB Concept) is “La Clef du Temps” (the Key to Time) – a watch created by Buttet in collaboration with the brand’s R&D team. It is the first timepiece created in the “Les Masters” collection. It is a working prototype of a sophisticated timepiece called “La Clef du Temps”, which will be produced in small series after the Only Watch 09 auction. It is an innovative tourbillon watch featuring a hand-wound mechanical movement with hour and minute indications, a 3-day power reserve indication (PRI) in a 120° sectoral indicator at 8 o’clock and retrograde running seconds at 4 o’clock. The retrograde seconds of 0, 30, 60 depict the rhythm of time as it passes, and the power reserve reminds you when to rewind the piece as it makes its 0, ½, and 3-day passage. Like a body, if you don’t eat properly your body doesn’t function properly, and so with the watch if you forget to rewind it.
“The funds from Only Watch are there to indirectly help the children suffering from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy,” says Buttet. “So I thought: what is it that everyone hopes for? Everyone hopes that these children will live longer than expected. I wanted this watch to express this dilemma.”
Buttet wanted the piece to convey two very important and thought-provoking concepts associated with being a parent: Firstly, the idea that however rich you are, true luxury lies in the freedom to manage one’s time as one wishes; secondly, the watch has a sophisticated mechanism that allows the wearer to “adjust the speed” of his personal time by adjusting a simple three-position lever that alters the running speed of the hours and the minutes.
Hence Position 1 the pace of time slows by half so that the true value of one hour is displayed as a half-hour on the dial. Position 2 the pace of time stays at true/standard time. Position 3 the pace of time runs at double speed so a true/standard half-hour becomes a full hour on the dial of the watch.
As Buttet says, “This way, pleasant moments can be made to last twice as long while unpleasant ones can be shortened by half while the ability to ‘return’ to true time is always there.” The watch’s extremely sophisticated mechanism allows the watch’s time indications to remain in positions 1 or 3 as long as its wearer wishes, since a simple turn of the lever to position 2 (the watch’s memory) resets the hour and the minute hand to the real time of day.
As Buttet sees it, it’s his way of extracting some form of balance from a seemingly unjust world that makes us feel that when life is good, time flies, but it slows to a crawl during the rough patches. As with a child with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, the pleasure of the good times passes all too fast and the painful moments all too slow.
The movement is shaped like a stylized human brain because, according to Mathias Buttet, “Time is a sort of “state of mind” which is the result of the will of any single person. Not to have time to do something is, at the end, a personal decision and it is not at all something imposed by someone else. Every person decides if he or she wants to have the time to do or not to do something.” Moreover he adds “If you look at the figures on the dial you will see that they are mirror images of themselves. Some numbers are reflected face-to-face, showing the moments that are the result of the one’s will; others are reflected back-to-back: in this case, it is fate that controls your life.”
The futuristic case is shaped like a spaceship – ever searching for a better life, and the strap is composed of four rubber-clad steel strands. Lifetime warranty and the totally Swiss-made provenance of its every part and component are other characteristics of the “La Clef du Temps”.
Perhaps the next James Bond villain with plans to dominate the planet can time his greedy destruction with this newly announced Hysek "Colosso." Most obvious is the cyrstal pustule filled with a dimensional earth rotating for local or GMT time. And of course, appropriately priced for any haute dictatorship ($550,000).
sideviews
Movement:
Hours, quarter and minute repeater, cathedral timbre, 62 jewels
Functions:
Big date at 12 o'clock, indication of the cities of the 24 time zones linked to the GMT
Retrograde time zones with a linear double display situated at the lower and displayed in curvex position with indication arrows that indicate which side to observe (24 to 12 hours / 12 to 24 hours).
Transmission feedback, biplan, for time zone indications, made by 2 dials.
Power Reserve: 48h
Frequency: 18'000 vibrations / hour
Globe:
3 dimensions globe of 12mm diameter at 12 o'clock, considered as a visual GMT display turns on itself in 24 hours and can be set on local or on GMT time.
by Alex Doak (exclusively for The Watchismo Times) Definitive List #1: Tourbillons in space,space,pace,ace,ace…! There nothing quite like a definitive list of stuff to warm the cockles of a straightforward, slightly obsessive bloke such as myself (or “multi-talented bloke” as certain blog proprietors would naïvely have it…). Much like Nick Hornby’s central character in High Fidelity, I find little else more satisfying than pigeonholing the components of my obsession – in this case watches of course, as opposed to pop songs – into their discrete subsets and arranging things appropriately in chronological, alphabetical, autobiographical, or even aesthetical fashion.
So for Definitive List #1, by way of background, let’s kick off proceedings by listing every tourbillon ever made to date…. No, stupid idea. What about bi-axial tourbillons, then? That’s easier – but still long-winded. Why, there’s Thomas Prescher’s Torkel pocket watch; Franck Muller’s Revolution 2; Jean Dunand’s Tourbillon Orbital; Blu’s Majesty Tourbillon; anything by Greubel Forsey; Panerai’s misplaced new entry to the world of manufacture movements, P.2005; the similar ‘tumbling’ cage mechanism at the heart of HD3’s Vulcania; Girard-Perregaux’s huge SIHH 2008 launch, the imaginatively titled “Bi-Axial Tourbillon”… My quasi-OCD tendencies are nagging at me to complete the list, but that’s no fun. As James Gurney noted in QP’s editorial last year, in reference to Michael Balfour’s joyous new “Cult Watches” book, there’s nothing quite like a list to inspire controversy. Tell your readers that the Swiss watch industry is a cynical, PR-fed cartel, and nothing. On the other hand, dare to omit Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Gyrotourbillon from a list of two-axis tourbillons and watch all hell break loose. (See? I didn’t forget it!)
So, in descending chronological order, here’s my definitive list of three-dimensional, or rather triple-axis tourbillons – with one notable deliberately left out. Send answers->here. The prize is the pride.*
1. Aaron Becsei’sPrimus, unveiled this year at the AHCI stand at Baselworld. An extraordinary achievement for someone born in 1979. Puts your life’s work in perspective don’t it…?
2. “TAT”, from Thomas Prescher’s Trilogy – you get a single-axis and double-axis wristwatch in the bargain too! Another sickeningly youthful prodigy.
3. Revolution 3 – much prettier in the flesh than Franck Muller’s perpetually hideous CAD images imply.
4. Richard Good’s carriage clock (Prescher’s inspiration).
Tourbillons rotating in space are not a new thing though. As far back as 1860, American watchmaker Albert Potter constructed a tourbillon with an inclined balance for a carriage clock. German watchmaker Walter Prendel drew inspiration from the master horologer Alfred Helwig and tried again in 1928 to place the tourbillon in space, this time in a pocket watch. The balance spring and rotor was inclined 30 degrees from the horizontal and made one rotation in six minutes. In 1980, English watchmaker Anthony Randall – up there with Derek Pratt, Daniels, Dufour et al. – patented the first tourbillon with two perpendicular axes. Over 20 years later, Richard Danners developed a double-axis tourbillon in a large 55mm pocket watch for Gübelin.
*and yes, this does conveniently let me off the hook for not researching thoroughly enough…
I've been waiting to see more extensive photos of the Cabestan by Vianney Halter and Jean-François Ruchonnet of the DMC Group. So thanks to SuitbertW who just shot these for The Purists. The Cabestan has yet to go into production (as far as I know) and these prototypes seem to be the only existing specimens so far.
The rolling barreled displays are powered by chain links and fusee wound by a winding winch!
This really spectacular architecture seems to be absolutely original. The mechanical design of the Cabestan, including its tourbillon, is totally transversal. The indications (hour, minute, seconds, and power reserve) appear on the cylinders located at the four “corners” of the watch. Starting from the lower left, we find the barrel, which transmits its driving power to the movement by the intermediary of a chain. This chain is connected to a second cylinder, at the upper left, made up of one part of a fusee (placed horizontally as opposed to the traditional fusees that are always vertical), and the other of the cylindrical power reserve indicator (a total of 72 hours).
Still on the upper end, but this time on the right, we find two cylinders next to each other, providing the perfectly readable hours and minutes. In the lower right hand corner, we can see the tourbillon, which is also placed vertically and is directly linked to another cylinder, which quite logically gives the seconds indication, as the tourbillon makes one rotation per minute. This completely original mechanical movement, with manual winding, a fusee and a tourbillon, integrates six ball bearings into its operation. It is also water-resistant to 30 metres. The entire movement is visible from above and from the side, under a double sapphire crystal (“Trimaran” model) with three recessed and curved sides, taking the form of a “hood”, all in a very sturdy design.
Winding the watch and setting the hour and minutes are effected using a winding stem in the form of a movable “winch” that links directly to one of the small “capstans” that are found at the four exterior angles of the case: at the upper left, it acts directly on the fusee and, by the intermediary of the chain, allows the barrel to be wound; at the upper right, it acts on the minute cylinder which is connected to that of the hours. The two other small “capstans” are only there for decoration and to complete the aesthetics of the case. Once the small winch is used, it is easily stored in the buckle of the watch’s bracelet.
I wish watch brands would release real photos along with their Computer renderings. Though it is likely the real watch isn't even completed when you first see them as CAD (above).
