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…
Christophe Claret is a watchmaker who makes very, very different watches. He pioneered watches incorporating belt drives, metal balls in cylinders, and a number of gaming watches featuring poker, baccarat, blackjack, roulette and dice. So far, all his watches have been for men. This year, he presented Margot at Baselworld, the first Christophe Claret watch…
One of the features of a mechanical watch is that the seconds hand doesn’t tick seconds, but seems to move in a near-constant sweep. On closer examination, you see that it moves in small pulses, each much less than a second. A quartz watch, on the other hand, ticks one second at a time. The…
The IWC Schaffhausen Pilot’s Watch Chronograph Edition JU-Air. Occasionally in the skies of Europe, you see a large, slow, three-engined aircraft with a corrugated-steel fuselage, usually flying low, and with three letters painted large on one wing: IWC. It’s a Ju-52, a German aircraft whose long history earnt it a reputation similar to that of…
L’Heure Masquée by Hermès. Hermès is a brand best known for its scarves and leather goods, but its watches are also superb, and a fine expression of the maison’s distinctively ironic touch, perhaps less easy to discern in its fashion products. Now an integrated watch manufacture – in other words, most of the operations required…