Mechanical watches with digital displays are rarer than most, and they have a long history. This year at SIHH, IWC celebrates its 150th anniversary with the “Tribute to Pallweber” edition. Last year, 2017, François-Paul Journe presented the third edition in the Vagabondage Series, named simply Vagabondage III. Digital displays, the problem is energy management The…
Élégante is a quartz watch, but unlike any quartz watch seen before. It has a mechanical motion detector, visible on the dial through a small window, so that if you put the watch down, the hands stop moving after 30 minutes. But the electronic movement still keeps track of time. When you put it back…
Once upon a time a fine gun was part of a gentleman’s armoury. Thankfully today this is no longer the case, but there are still the intriguing connections between gunmaking and watchmaking – which share terms like “barrel” and “calibre” – and this watch by F.P. Journe has a very close relationship with the ancient…
The F.P. Journe Centigraphe Souverain is an unusual watch because it is one of the very few chronographs that has – in my opinion – a logical dial layout. I have always felt that it’s illogical that in the usual chronograph layout, one of the subdials should be dedicated to continuous seconds, while the large…
This article on the best minute repeater watches 2014 looks at timepieces that tell the time by chimes as well as by the usual hour and minute hands. They are complicated and very expensive. They are nearly always limited editions because, even though the luxury market continues to thrive and the number of millionaires in…
In my experience, one of the practical problems with many conventional chronographs – the ones with two or three subdials for minutes and hours, which often end up looking a bit like a gas meter – is that they are often partly obscured by the minute or hour hand. These hands are usually much larger…
TAG Heuer Mikrograph 1/100th of a second chronograph Not many mechanical watches are capable of meausuring time to the nearest hundredth of a second. The brand with the longest history in this area is TAG Heuer, who presented their TAG Heuer Mikrograph 1/100th of a second chronograph, reference CAR5041.FC8178, in January 2011. This piece separates…
The F.P. Journe Centigraphe Souverain is a 100th of a second chronograph, with one hand that makes a revolution every second. The chronograph display has three dials, one for one second, one for 20 seconds, and one for ten minutes. For each, a tachymeter scale is marked inside the time scale, so on the one-second dial,…
F.P. Journe is a company that doesn’t make many watches. Somewhere between 800 and 900 a year. So approximately a thousand times less than Rolex. But they all have a distinctive appearance, often inspired by 18th-century watchmaking thought. François-Paul signs all his pieces with the Latin motto “Invenit et Fecit” reflecting that golden age in…