This watch is intriguing at first glance, with its off-centred hour and minute hands, the absence of the usual dial markings, and the slewed figure-of-eight that encloses the automatic winding rotor and the tourbillon. But where Piaget are excelling in their latest watches is in the crystalline clarity of the engineering, and their ability to…
This piece was presented at SIHH in 2014, and it is now available in boutiques in its red gold version. The Blancpain Villeret One Minute Flying Tourbillon 12 Days is a good example of Blancpain’s combination of traditional watchmaking and contemporary technology, with the anti-magnetic characteristics offered by the silicon balance spring and pallet fork…
L-Evolution is the name that Blancpain gives to its most advanced models, with modular case construction and some unusual movement features. The Tourbillon Carrousel, with its calibre 2322V2 movement, has a modern and sporty look, but it’s not as glacial and frosty as it looks from the press-release renderings. When you have it on the wrist,…
This is an exceptional minute repeater, because, like few others, you can hear it across a room. Like the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Concept RD#1, the sound is louder when the watch is worn on the wrist. At the same time, an open architecture reveals the movement, with both the tourbillon and the striking mechanism…
This watch is a limited edition version of the Montblanc Heritage Chronométrie ExoTourbillon Minute Chronograph, basically the same watch, but with a sapphire caseback decorated with a drawing of the São Gabriel, the ship that Vasco da Gama used for his pioneering voyage to India in 1497. In addition, the upper part of the dial…
This is a good example of Montblanc’s push to make complication watches more accessible. €38,000 sounds a lot, but for this sort of watch is an extraordinarily low price when compared to most tourbillons, particularly considering that it features the ExoTourbillon, a Montblanc exclusive rather different from the normal tourbillon, and a monopusher chronograph, with…
This was in my opinion the biggest surprise of SIHH 2015. In their Royal Oak Concept RD#1, Audemars Piguet haven’t invented a new category of watch, and they themselves have been making minute repeaters for over a century. But for the first time, they have succeeded in making a minute repeater that you can hear.…
When it comes to skeletonization, different brands do different things. Vacheron Constantin create Gothic edifices with graceful curving arches. Roger Dubuis’ aesthetic approach in this piece is somewhere between the arachnic and astronomic, with watchmaking director Gregory Bruttin referring to “the patient, meticulous and inventive nature of the work done by a resourceful arachnid as…
Montblanc are treading an interesting path, with a complete new range of entry-level watches in the Heritage Spirit collection alongside the existing Star collection that also caters for people looking for their first luxury watch. At the other end of the scale there are the super-high-end pieces such as the Villeret Tourbillon Cylindrique Geosphères Vasco…
The company that Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey, founded in 2004, has created 17 calibres and what they call 7 “capital inventions.” This year, they present just one new piece (the other novelties are variations on existing products), the Tourbillon 24 Secondes Vision, their thinnest watch to date, with a domed crystal on top and underneath.…
Last year, Richard Mille presented about eight new models at SIHH, this year just two. This was to ensure that the press could dedicate the right attention to these two watches, undiluted by other pieces that will in any case be released later on in the year. And one of them undoubtedly deserves attention. The…
This version of Omega’s classic Central Tourbillon watch has a coaxial calibre, and a bezel set with 24 baguette diamonds. The piece is unusual, amidst the tourbillon watches by different brands, for the position of the tourbillon itself. At the centre of the watch, the seconds hand is set into the titanium tourbillon cage which…
The Rotonde de Cartier Astrotourbillon is a watch that was presented in 2010, with the in-house Calibre 9451 MC movement in which the tourbillon has an elongated carriage that enables the balance to rotate around the dial, once a minute. The balance bridge is in the form of an arrow and so becomes a seconds…
The Rotonde de Cartier Reversed Tourbillon is one of the pieces that Cartier will present at SIHH 2015 in Geneva from 19 January 2015. Its principal feature is the deeply-cut guilloché work on the white gold dial, something that bears comparison with Richard Mille. The previous version of this watch, presented in 2012, had a…
Actually not twenty, but a few more: how can you resist adding as many as possible of these incredible machines! A tourbillon is one of those watch categories that separates the sheep from the goats. It’s not a third-party movement that you can buy from a manufacturer and assemble into your own case. And its so…
It’s outlandish, different, intriguing, magnetic. Maximilian Büsser describes the initial idea for the Horological Machine No. 6 Space Pirate, a spaceship from a Japanese manga TV series called Captain Future, in the form of a large sphere with a long connecting tube, and four arms. He and his team combined this with influence from the…
Snyper is a Geneva-based company founded in 2008 by a group of people whose enthusiasm for watches is combined with a military background. This is the origin of their ultra-military name and the rugged character of their timepieces, presented on a website that has recently been renewed. “Targets are met when time is under control” is…
The first watch made by Jean-Marc Vacheron in 1755 already had an openworked, engraved balance-cock, and over its 260 years of history, the brand’s craftspeople have become expert in this art. The Malte Tourbillon Openworked, reference 30135/000P-9842, is a mechanical, manually-wound watch, in a large case in platinum, 38 x 48 mm, 12.73 m thick.…
This question was prompted by the new Tourbillon RM56-02 Sapphire by Richard Mille, and also by one of those ironic paradoxes floating around the Internet. If the black box on an aircraft is indestructible, why don’t they make the whole aircraft from that material? In watches, sapphire glass is used for the watch glass and…
The “hommage” (tribute) in the name is the name of a family of watches, as well as being a tribute. Georges Kern, CEO of IWC, was involved in the management of Roger Dubuis for a short time after its acquisition by the Richemont group, and so the organization of Roger Dubuis’ watches into five major…