RIchard Mille‘s Heure Universelle was first presented in 2013 as RM 58-01. That was a tourbillon watch. This year’s RM 63-02 doesn’t have a tourbillon, but it shows the same attention for user-friendliness and easy adjustment. Its principal feature is the titanium rotating bezel, which can be used to rotate the cities ring. You simply place the name of the city in which you are in at 12 o’clock, and the main hour and minute hands show the local time. From the illustration you will see that the hour hand and the 24-hour inner ring are connected, so that while in London it is 17.00, in Paris it is 18.00, in Istanbul 19.00 and so forth. The 24-hour ring is divided into day and night by means of its white and blue colour. When the owner takes a flight and moves to somewhere else, he (it’s a 47 mm watch, 13.85 mm thick, so its users are going to be mainly men…) just rotates the bezel to the city to where he is going, and the hour hand follows automatically. The 24-hour ring moves forward every hour on the hour. It is a genuinely simple and intuitive method of showing the user the time anywhere in the world.

The indications on the dial look complicated, because the dial is in fact just a piece of transparent sapphire bearing the hour indices. What you see underneath is the movement, with skeletonized date wheels that combine to show the date in a frame at 12 o’clock. At 4 o’clock there is another window that indicates the function of the crown, selected using the pusher on the lower crown protector: neutral, winding, time-setting.

As is usual with Richard Mille timepieces, this watch is made from high-tech materials. The mainplate and most of the bridges are in electroplasma-treated titanium; the upper bridge is in black-rhodium-plated nickel silver. Water resistance is 30 metres.

The watch is powered by the in-house CRMA3 calibre, self-winding, with a rotor in red gold and titanium visible through the display caseback. It provides a power reserve of 50 hours. The price of the watch is about €131,000.