A. Lange & Söhne create brilliant, complex watches, but they don’t shout about it. One of the two great German watch brands (with Glashütte Original) based in Glashütte, near Dresden, A. Lange & Söhne delights its fans and collectors with watches whose complexity of functions is accompanied by wonderful movements and understated dial design. In…
Van Cleef & Arpels make complication watches, but the complications are always about telling a story. In the Midnight Planétarium Poetic Complication, the story is one of the most beautiful of them all: the planets revolving around the sun. I still think that this piece was one of the highlights of the two major shows…
Pinion Watch Company is a new name on the watchmaking scene, now presenting the Axis Pure. Like their previous models, the Axis Pure has a dial designed for easy readability, with a bespoke luminescent paint for hour markings and hands. The colour of this SuperLuminova was chosen to resemble the old paints containing radioactive materials…
Richard Mille is a company born at the start of the millennium and all its products have a high-tech, modernistic look and feel, using high-tech materials such as carbon fibre, titanium and other ultra-light alloys. The RM 36-01 is no exception. Called the Tourbillon Competition G Sensor Sebastian Loeb, it is built from carbon nanotubes…
A gold Rolex that belonged to President Eisenhower will be auctioned in September 2014, with an estimated value of $1 million. Part of the Raleigh DeGeer Amyx collection, it will be auctioned by RR Auction in Boston. The watch, an Oyster Perpetual Datejust on a Jubilee bracelet, was the 150,000th piece manufactured by Rolex, and…
The Patrimony Traditionelle 14-day Tourbillon Openworked has a lot in common with the great Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe, where the architects removed stone from windows to let in as much light as possible, and where the lines of stress were revealed and expressed by daring, filigree flying buttresses. This piece by Vacheron Constantin is…
If you like watches that look a bit different, De Bethune have something to offer you. Their Dream Watch 5.2 has a sort of unsettling sci-fi beauty, with the half-organic, half-mechanical forms of Alien, and the triangular innovation of Hamilton’s triangular watch in Men in Black. The digital time indications hark back to the electric…
Founded in 1775 by Abraham-Louis Breguet, the company will reach its 240th anniversary next year. Perhaps this is why this year, 2014, there were not many new products by the brand at Baselworld. They’re saving the fireworks for 2015. I’ve always found it hard to imagine how a watch company can prepare for an anniversary,…
Bulgari’s watch collection has developed into an extraordinary range, and the new pieces presented at Baselworld 2014 were very interesting: Lucea, the new women’s watch, Octo Velocissimo, a chronograph with a dramatically faceted case, Ammiraglio del Tempo, a grand complication, and many more. These watchmaking riches reflect the fact that this an important year for…
No prizes for guessing which market Corum was thinking of with the Golden Bridge Dragon. The watch is based on the manually-wound linear movement CO 113, an arrangement which has been a Corum speciality since 1980. It is built along a vertical axis, and this linear design is enhanced by the position of the crown at…
The video of the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner rehearsing for the Farnborough airshow went viral on the web, with a take-off that develops into a near-vertical climb, so steep that I was thinking, “they must have done that with CGI.” (See link below). The guys at Bremont will have been impressed, and happy. Bremont signed a…
Just about every year Piaget collects another world record for the thinness of its watches, and this year (2014) they couldn’t avoid doing it again because it’s their 140th anniversary. The Piaget Altiplano 38 mm 900P is the world’s thinnest watch at just 3.65 millimetres, and the jewelled version of the watch is the world’s…
The wealth of watches presented by Jaeger-LeCoultre this year at SIHH almost defies belief. One model after another, with many technical innovations, and a whole series of fine jewellery watches in the Hybris Artistica collection. But it was the Master Ultra Thin Minute Repeater Flying Tourbillon that really caught my attention, and not just for…
Blue Cruiser is the latest version of the Freak, a revolutionary watch introduced by Ulysse Nardin in 2001. Freak is a watch totally different from most, because most of the movement forms the minute hand, revolving around the case, with the balance, which is justifiably defined as a flying carrousel-tourbillon, in full view at the…
Glashütte is not just a watch, it’s the name of a town. And it’s a long story of resilience and survival, starting in 1845 when the local silver mines started to run out. Ferdinand Adolph Lange had visited Switzerland, where he had seen what the watch companies were doing there, and he responded to an…
For its watches, Montblanc operates from two manufacturing units, one in Le Locle, and one in Villeret, near Neuchatel. The second is a traditional building, filled with traditional machinery, in which watchmakers still make timepieces by hand, performing just about all operations, including construction of the balance springs, by hand. Montblanc’s racier and more youthful…
Longines is a remarkable company. They are top in the world in a specific price bracket, from 900 to 3,000 Swiss francs. Their brand image is superb, nurtured by a careful selection of brand ambassadors who help reinforce the Longines defining slogan, “elegance is an attitude.” Their industrial strategy is well-planned: they use Baselworld not…
Cartier presented some very original watches at SIHH in January 2014, and the Rotonde de Cartier Day and Night represents an unusual treatment of the moon phase. Usually, moon phase watches have a circular disc with two moons on it, which rotates behind an opening in the dial with two semicircular shapes, so that in…
In 1957, Omega’s objective when designing the Speedmaster chronograph was to create “a new type of chronograph, for research, industry and sport.” From then, it has become part of watch legend, used for space missions from 1965 after its approval by NASA, recording man’s first steps on the moon’s surface on 21 July 1969, and…
Baume & Mercier is a brand out there in the tough arena of entry-level watches, along with Longines, Hamilton and others, and they recently celebrated the first anniversary of its Clifton range with a tango competition in Dubai. Clifton includes a wide range of models, classic and accessible, and the reference 10149 is one of…