Thanks to Jack Forster of Horomundi for showing some of the very first thorough full-view shots of the C1 Tourbillon Gravity by Concord.
Read more about the production at the Concord micro-site featuring a blog about its production-->Link
From Urwerk's presentation of the new UR-202 Twin Turbine-->Link
Watchmaker Andreas Strehler is introducing the Papillon, his independent follow-up to last years Opus 7 for Harry Winston.
Watching The Passage of Time
Fascinating Design
The Purists have posted some pretty amazing shots of the Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso Gyrotourbillon 2 as well as some brain busting technical information.
Sometimes these CAD renderings start all looking the same to me. Concord thankfully has provided The Watchismo Times with the first real world photos of their anticipated C1 Tourbillon Gravity. The Tourbillon is placed vertically and viewable from the side of the watch. More next week from Basel...
I had a blast trying on a MB&F HM1 (and HM2!) late last year and decided to buy one if Max would give me an installment plan of $100 a month for 1500 months. Sadly, I am still sans Horological Machine.
HM1-Ti is an extremely sophisticated timepiece on many levels: visually, technically and emotionally. As much, if not more, art and sculpture as micro-engineering.
The challenge of applying a variety of multi-faceted fine finishes to the difficult-to-work titanium has been rewarded by the vibrant juxtaposition of light reflecting off the contrasting highly polished and matte-satin surfaces.
Soon to be announced Richard Mille 018 "Hommage a Boucheron" with purported precious stones for the mechanism.
On the heels of Stepan Sarpaneva's industrial designed Korona K1 (featured previously here->link) is the phenomenal bas-relief double moonphase Korona K3. Simultaneously, he's sent me early pics of the prototype skeletonized K2 with cutout date disc (below).
White gold dimensional moonphase
Korona K3 white gold caseback moon & winding mass
Korona K2 with the skeletonized and cutout date disc
K2 Caseback
Greubel Forsey Invention Piece No. 1
B-Side Dial
Debuting in April 2008 at SIHH in Geneva, Jaeger LeCoultre will be introducing another mindblowing Gyrotourbillon movement but this time as part of the Reverso collection. The Gyrotourbillon features a spherical tourbillon with two carriages spinning on two axes freeing the regulating organ from effects of gravity in all positions. Reverso watches can be flipped over for alternative displays. The 2006 Reverso a Triptyque, one of the most complicated watches ever made and also the world's first three faced watch.
The Gyrotourbillon 1 (above), first introduced in 2006 features a double cage tourbillon with equation of time and perpetual calendar and the Master Minute Repeater that produces tones at 55 decibels or double the volume of the world’s next loudest minute repeater.
Helsinki watchmaker, Stepan Sarpaneva, nephew of the famed Finnish mid-century designer Timo Sarpaneva, has produced yet another stellar timepiece -- the Korona K1. Following the success of his very limited and sold-out Supernova series (featured here->link), Stepan is quickly forming a large celestial body of work with the addition of the Korona to his intimate galaxy.
44mm wide and 9.6mm tall, the nearly full-Finnish production is made entirely of stainless steel including the dial, date disc, hands, crown, case, and rotor. The grated dial design reminds me of the incredible variety of antique manhole covers found all over here in New York City-->Link
The first public appearance of a Korona K1 (K2 & K3) will be at the upcoming Baselworld watch fair in Basel Switzerland. Stepan will be exhibiting with superstar independents Vianney Halter and others.
The skeletonized vertical date window
Here is a clearer image of the skeletonized calendar digits
The prototype Korona K1 shot direct from Sarpaneva's bench
The rear rotor/winding mass
The black-diamond coated Korona
From the looks of it, 2008 might be an interesting year.
One of the very first owners of a MB&F Horological Machine No.2 has shared his images and thoughts-->Link
"It’s an object which I can’t stop staring at. It is anything but tactile (unlike the HM-1 which was all in curves) but I can’t stop touching it."
A thermometer watch box for the HM2!
The 2000 year old Antikythera Mechanism, the worlds oldest computing device (and 1000 years more advanced than comparable mechanisms). Only discovered 100 years ago in a shipwreck.
Wilhelm Schickard’s Calculating Clock (1632) that could add and subtract six-digit numbers (with a bell as an overflow alarm). This invention was used by his friend, astronomer Johannes Kepler, to calculate astronomical tables, which was a big leap for astronomy at the time. For this, Wilhelm Schickard was considered by some to be the "Father of Computer Age."
Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline (or Arithmetique) from 1645 - The basic mechanism of the Pascaline is a series of gears - when the first gear with ten teeth made one rotation (one to ten), it shifts a second gear until it rotated ten times (one hundred). The second gear shifted a third one (thousands) and so on. This mechanism is still in use today in car odometers, electricity meters and at the gas pumps.
German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' Stepped Reckoner of the 17th century was inspired by a steps-counting machine (pedometer) he saw to build his own calculator. Leibniz’s design used a special type of gear called the Stepped Drum or Leibniz wheel, a cylinder with nine bar-shaped teeth along its length.
Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine from 1822 was considered one of the first mechanical computers. Despite of its unwieldy design, his plan called for a basic architecture very similar to that of a modern computer.
During World War II, Nazi Germany used an electro-mechanical cipher machine called Enigma to encrypt and decrypt coded messages. It used rotors to substitute letters (for example, an "E" might be coded as "T"). The genius of the Enigma was that the machine used polyalphabetic cipher, where the rotation of the rotors allowed each subsequent letters to be encoded in a different manner. (For example, "EEE" might be become "TIF").
