From the sundial to precision timekeeping on land :

At the dawn of humanity, the sun’s progression through the sky marked time and was a valuable aid to travellers. Thousands of years later, in the fifteenth century B.C., the astronomers of Thutmose III of Egypt used portable sundials: the length of the shadow cast by the sun indicated key moments in the day. Thanks to the Romans’ erudition, in the third century B.C. a handful of scholars carried small sundials that could be adjusted according to the time of year. The principle behind these devices, which were in essence travel watches, continued to be used into the eighteenth century, despite the advent and development of the mechanical watch towards the end of the fifteenth century. It was the mechanical watch that wealthy sixteenth-century travellers would often wear round their necks. Still highly inaccurate and with an autonomy of just a few hours, it came complete with an alarm and a sundial linked to a compass. Calculated to be used in towns on different latitudes, this sundial served to reset the watch, sunlight permitting. Since then, jewellers such as CARTIER have transformed these functional objects of the past into dazzling contemporary creations Among the items recorded in the royal household expenses of Louis XI was the acquisition in 1481, from watchmaker Jean de Paris, of a clock that struck the hours. Protected inside a case, it was loaded onto a horse and the horse’s driver paid five sous tournois for himself and his mount to transport the clock wherever its royal owner might travel. Surely we can see here the ancestor of the coaching watches that reached their apogee in the eighteenth century. These timepieces were always of an imposing size and were hung inside the coach to absorb some of the jolts caused by the potholed roads. Originally fitted with a twenty-four-hour dial and a single hand for the hours they gradually grew to resemble their pocket counterparts and contemporaries. Equipped with additional functions such as an alarm, sonnerie and repeater striking work, and sometimes a calendar, their main production centres were London, Paris, Geneva, as well as Holland, and they were adapted to local markets, in particular Turkey. Watches of this type remained in use until the French Revolution.

The watch resolves the problem of longitude at sea :

As long as they sailed near the coast and in daylight, sailors could always gauge their position “by sight”. As they began venturing west and east, as was the case from the late fifteenth century, they left channels whose latitude they had been able to calculate with a quadrant since antiquity. Common to both seafarers and astronomers, the quadrant is a quarter circle in wood or bronze with graduated degrees around its limb. Crews would “dead reckon”, attempting to plot their position by observing the stars and the direction of the currents and winds. They measured the ship’s rate with a log line, a wooden triangle attached to a long rope with knots tied at regular intervals. The sailor would drop the log line overboard, then count the number of knots that ran out in thirty seconds, timed with a sandglass. Time and again, these empirical and imprecise methods ended in dramatic shipwrecks. Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America in 1492, Vasco da Gama’s establishing of a trade route to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, and the first circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 rapidly transformed the oceans into a vast economic and military battlefield. The great nations would stop at nothing to win control of sea routes and return from new eldorados with untold wealth. The need to establish precise navigation techniques was pressing. In 1598, Philip III of Spain offered six thousand ducats, a life pension of two thousand ducats and a gratuity of a thousand ducats to whomever found a means of accurately locating one’s position at sea. Scholars put forward numerous solutions based on the study of the distance between the earth and the moon, or the position of the noontime sun. A 1765 account noted that the first method—which after numerous improvements prevailed until 1907—took “no more than four hours” to obtain a result to within one degree, which at the equator corresponded to some 110 kilometres. The second method determined the exact longitude by comparing local noon with an hour of reference. Ships still use this method today, even though their exact position is given to them. The best way to calculate longitude at sea was therefore to take a clock aboard ship. This idea— possibly initiated by Hernando Columbus, son of Christopher Columbus—was raised in 1510 by Alonzo do Santa Cruz and was taken up again by Gemma Frisius, a mathematician, astronomer and physician at Leuven University. However, this was an epoch when ships set sail with a sundial and compass as their timekeeping equipment, and the lack of means by which to accurately measure time rendered this idea impractical. Clockmakers thus turned their attention to the question of how to measure longitude at sea. The first pendulum clock was built in 1657, conforming to instructions by the Dutch physicist, astronomer and geometer Christian Huygens (1629–1695). His invention paved the way for precision timekeeping, and the following year Huygens set about adapting it to clocks that could be taken aboard ship. Around 1660, he came up with the first ever nautical clock. In 1675, he invented the spiral hairspring which, when adapted to the watch, permitted a substantial gain in accuracy. Four years later, he set aside pendulum clocks to concentrate on timepieces fitted with a balance and spring: the precursors of marine chronometers. Sea trials proved disappointing, in particular as temperature changes affected the elasticity of the spring. As talented as he was, Huygens lacked the technology to resolve this problem. The Observatoire de Paris was founded in 1667 with the primary vocation of studying longitudes. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich was founded in 1675. On October 22, 1707, four British men o’ war commanded by Admiral Shovell were wrecked on the Scilly Isles off the Cornish coast, costing the lives of some two thousand men, the admiral among them. This humiliating disaster prompted a petition to Parliament. It resulted in the Longitude Act, passed on July 8, 1714, which offered twenty thousand pounds, fifteen thousand pounds and ten thousand pounds respectively to whomever found a reliable method that could determine longitude to within a half, two-thirds and one degree. The question of longitude at sea had thus become an affair of state. And in this race, the English and the French would lead the field. Having learned his father’s trade of carpentry, John Harrison (1693–1776) then threw himself into clockmaking. After extensive research, he tested his H4 chronometer during two sea trials in 1761 and 1764. Its accuracy exceeded that required by the numerous rules and regulations of the competitions instituted since the end of the sixteenth century. The publication in 1779 of a pamphlet entitled Notes for Those Who Own Chronometers gave credence to this new term, which Jeremy Thacker had coined in 1714; little by little, it replaced the original designation of “sea clock”. Alongside John Harrison, numerous Master watchmakers played their part in the development and perfecting of the marine chronometer. George Graham, Thomas Mudge, Larcum Kendall, John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw excelled in England, while Pierre Le Roy and Swiss-born Ferdinand Berthoud excelled in France. While Harrison and Le Roy looked to the future, Berthoud, Arnold and Earnshaw were more pragmatic, taking full advantage of existing possibilities to envisage series production. They each worked towards a triple objective that would improve precision: invent an escapement that would allow the balance to oscillate freely without being disturbed by residual friction from the gears; discover a means of compensating for temperature differences; maintain the chronometer’s accuracy despite the rolling of the ship. In 1754, Pierre Le Roy devised a system that he named “detent escapement” and which was considered the most suitable for a marine chronometer. In 1766, he produced what would be the ultimate marine chronometer, which included a system for temperature compensation. Henceforth, and until the twentieth century, a marine chronometer comprised a watch in gimbals, protected inside a varnished wooden box. Chronometers such as these were built to strict specifications by leading specialists in technical horology, among them A. LANGE & SÖHNE, Henri PERREGAUX, brother-in-law to Constant GIRARD-PERREGAUX, and VACHERON & CONSTANTIN. In 1844, Antoine LeCOULTRE created the Millionometre , the first standard instrument to measure to within a micron or one thousandth of a millimetre. The handiwork of a watchmaker rather than a physicist or engineer, for over half a century the Millionometre made it possible to manufacture accurately calibrated pinions for marine chronometers. Meanwhile in England, Thomas Earnshaw and John Arnold were facing similar challenges. The one hundred or so chronometers that left Arnold’s workshop won him the admiration of Abraham-Louis BREGUET, who was himself acclaimed for the improvements he brought to bear in this field. Arnold filed patents for his discoveries, including the cylindrical spring—even though Robert Hooke could claim credit for its invention—which GIRARD-PERREGAUX chose for its 1880 precision watch with tourbillon under two gold bridges. The signature on the dial is superfluous, as one look at the movement is enough to identify the author of this piece. The gold bridges, unique in the history of Fine Watches, are a reflection of the creativity, skill and expertise that remain the preserve of a rare few Master watchmakers. Surprisingly, the chronometer was slow to be adopted; even the English Navy only acquired its first chronometers around 1825. Indeed, few sailors grasped navigational theory, treatises on old orientation techniques were regularly reprinted and the rare Master watchmakers capable of producing accurate chronometers did so at dissuasive prices. Only captains in the merchant navy who navigated in the polar or as yet uncharted regions were immediately won over by this invention. Certain of the watches used in these marine chronometers were objects of technical wizardry. One such piece struck the four-hour periods during which members of the crew would take turns on duty. Against all expectations, it was signed CARTIER.

Watchmaking and the expansion of the railway, bicycle and automobile :

While progress in maritime navigation relied entirely on the ability to precisely measure time, the rise of the railway had little bearing on timekeeping accuracy. It was, however, responsible for the substitution of local time with universal time, and as a result profoundly influenced how we perceive and measure the hour. Hereafter, and for the first time in human history, apparent time, measured by the movement of the sun, was forever replaced by artificial time. By the late eighteenth century, time measurement had reached a high degree of precision. In the absence of a single regional or national time, clocks and watches displayed local time whereby noon was the instant when the sun crossed the meridian in that locality. This local time was provided by sundials used to set timekeeping instruments. The difference in two local times was of little consequence as horse-drawn coaches could only muster enough speed to travel, at best, fifty—sometimes no more than thirty—kilometres a day. Seasoned travellers could consult a “captain’s watch”, whose two separate mechanisms and dials could give local time in two different places. Then came the railway and with it the capability to cover long distances rapidly. Soon, the confusion caused by the different local times along a train’s route, the fact that no distinction was made between times before and after noon, and the ever-increasing speeds resulted both in inconvenience and collisions. In an attempt to simplify life for train conductors and passengers alike, as early as 1847 England established a single national timescale based on its London meridian. Following conclusive trials carried out in 1840 on the London to Blackwell line, as from 1852, hour, minute and second signals were transmitted by telegraph from the Greenwich Observatory. Over in the United States, more than four thousand kilometres of track crossed the country from east to west. Each railway—and shipping—company ran according to its own time, based on the meridian in the location of its head office. Aware of the impossibility of imposing Washington time nationwide, Sir Sanford Fleming, in 1876, proposed that the country be divided into five time zones. Delegates at the 1883 Geodetic Conference in Rome imagined a concept for universal time by dividing the earth along its circumference into twenty-four zones, each with a longitude of fifteen degrees corresponding to one hour. The first of these zones had the Greenwich meridian as its axis, with the legal time for each locality in a given zone being the mean time at that zone’s meridian. Thanks to this solution, the number of local times was cut from seventy-four to five in the United States and from twenty-seven to just three in Europe. However, several decades would pass before universal time, as recommended—though not imposed—by the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, was accepted and time zones coincided exactly with national coastlines and borders. Even after the 1884 conference, several states were reluctant to give up their local mean time while others neglected to bring public services into line with the new standard. The Speaking Clock made its debut in 1933 at the Observatoire de Paris, from where its beeps could be heard over the telephone or transmitted to ships and aeroplanes by radio. The date line was also the subject of numerous adjustments. By unwittingly crossing this line, the heroes of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, who believed themselves to be five minutes late, had in fact gained a day and thus won their wager. On April 1, 1892, railways in southern Germany, Austria and Hungary, followed shortly after by Italy, adopted the single Central European Time. Switzerland, which since 1853 had used Bern mean time as the official timescale for its telegraph and postal services, adopted Central European Time on June 1, 1894 and put it to use on its railways. And thus a new legal time known as “railway time” was created and every railway company of a given country ran its trains according to it. However, on departure as on arrival, travellers were faced with a rather puzzling station clock with multiple dials. One displayed legal time while a second indicated the railway company’s time. In Geneva, one dial gave federal or Bern time, a second Genevan time and a third Paris time for trains arriving from France. To confuse matters further—and hurry passengers along—the clock on the front of the station was always five minutes faster than the one inside, to which train departure times actually referred. In such circumstances, as the railway’s popularity grew so did demand for pocket watches, which meant manufacturing and sales flourished. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of these new customers chose fancy silver watches with cases engraved with one of the countless steam and later electric locomotives that plied the tracks at that time. Some were the work of highly skilled engravers, while others made do with less lifelike outlines, including in the ornamentation of their winding keys. All these watches reflected trends in keeping with prevailing tastes and implied that the quality of the particular watch in question made it as punctual as the trains themselves. Much rarer “railway watches” were manufactured for governments and railway companies to stringent specifications. Their principal characteristics were solidity, precision, easy winding thanks to a large crown and a perfectly legible dial. On certain models, the crown and the hand-setting button could be sealed so that only an officially authorised person could proceed with the daily task of winding and setting the watch. Just as rail networks and steam trains were revolutionising nineteenth-century transport and communication, numerous vehicles other than horse-drawn carriages began to take possession of the roads. Like the railways, they too offered an endless source of inspiration for watch decoration. The bicycle, the first means of transport to exceed the speed of a human runner, was the brainchild of the German Karl Friedrich Drais von Sauerbronn in 1813. In 1861, Pierre Michaux added pedals to the front wheel, and the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris spread the bicycle’s fame as far as America. Major cycle races were staged throughout the 1890s; this was also the decade that the Michelin brothers fitted bicycle wheels with detachable tyres. In 1903, Henri Desgrange founded the Tour de France, still the world’s biggest cycling event. These races helped popularise the bicycle, in addition to its increased affordability. City dwellers could spend a day cycling in the country; employees could ride their bicycles to work. The bicycle was one of the contributing factors in women’s emancipation, not least as it influenced how they dressed. Improvements to the combustion engine combined with the bicycle to give the first lightweight motorcycles. In 1894, the Munich-based manufacturer Hildebrand & Wolfmüller produced the first real motorbike, intended to appeal as much to women as to men. In 1902, another company, Clement, built heavy machines with which professional cyclists could train. From this point on, nothing would stand in the way of the motorcycle. Like trains, the automobile in its early days was steam-driven. Although Isaac de Rivaz from Switzerland invented the first automobile to be powered by a combustion engine in 1805, it was only towards the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the motorised three-wheeler could be truly considered an automobile. As with bicycles, competitions were staged. the first car race took place in 1887 between the Paris suburbs of Neuilly and Versailles; the first officially timed car race, from Paris to Bordeaux and back, was held in 1895. The first Paris Motor Show opened in 1898 in the Parc des Tuileries. The turn of the century saw Grand Prix racing emerge in Europe and America, sparking huge interest in motor sports. Both competitors and timekeepers measured performances with a pocket chronograph. Created in the early 1820s for horse breeders eager to time their champion racers, these instruments now also included tachymetric scales. One such scale on an early twentieth-century piece by DUNHILL took the form of a spiral graduated from fifteen to two hundred kilometres per hour. It could gauge the speed of numerous moving objects, from a runner to a cantering or galloping horse, a horse-drawn or steam tram, a homing pigeon, a racing cyclist or automobile, to name just a few. The accepted rule was to measure longer distances to the nearest second and shorter distances to one-fifth of a second. In the latter case, the chronograph with jumping seconds and DUNHILL’s split-seconds chronographs were in particular demand. Chronographs aside, wristwatches specifically for automobile owners were a rarity. The most original examples displayed inventiveness in terms of design, such as the “shuttered” model by VAN CLEEF & ARPELS or “driver” models by CARTIER and VACHERON CONSTANTIN. Watchmaking’s greatest contribution to the automobile consists in onboard watches, which were fixed to the dashboard, steering wheel or rearview mirror. Edmond JAEGER, who undertook considerable research and filed numerous patents in this field, played a key role which his company would maintain at an international level throughout the twentieth century. Watchmaking was omnipresent at the turn of the twentieth century. Officers used counters with an audible signal to keep time as their men marched. Soldiers and travellers consulted watches with a curvimeter or a compass, two essential accessories for map readers. Extremely functional, certain models, such as the one proposed by DUNHILL, were fitted with a telemetric scale on their reverse side—a useful addition for artillerymen and explorers. Meanwhile, hikers and ramblers soon adopted wristwatches equipped with a compass. In 1917, the American Corps of Engineers commissioned VACHERON CONSTANTIN to make 3,289 precision chronographs, each individually numbered and bearing the inscription “Corps of Engineers USA”. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the railways which had so inspired watchcase engravers were technically sound, while cars were gaining in reliability and comfort. The aeroplane, meanwhile, was still in its infancy.

Watchmaking and aeronautics :

To defy gravity, to swoop and soar like a bird—man’s oldest dream is that of Icarus. A dream that began to take shape on June 4, 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Etienne, saw their paper-lined linen balloon inflate with hot air and rise above the ground at Annonay, south of Lyons. In September, another hot-air balloon carrying a duck, a cock and a sheep ascended into the sky over Versailles before the royal family and a cheering crowd. On November 21, 1783, François Pilatre de Rozier flew eight kilometres over Paris before coming safely to land. Politicians, scientists and intrigued citizens were carried along on a wave of enthusiasm, and soon hot-air balloons were decorating furniture, glass, porcelain, and, of course, domestic clocks and watches. With numerous attempts at motorisation being made from the 1850s, aerostation gradually became part of the wider science of air navigation. In 1890, Clément Ader succeeded in setting aloft a motorised heavier-than-air craft. He went on to make the first ever flight in history in 1897, a year after Daimler had invented the combustion engine—the catalyst for the rapid development of the motorbike, automobile and aeroplane. The Aéro Club de France, the world’s first national air club, was founded in 1898, followed three years later by its Swiss counterpart. The first balloon races were held in 1906. At the second Paris Motor Show, an ancillary aeronautic exhibition was organised at the Grand Palais. A year later, the first show entirely dedicated to aviation opened to the public. The early days of aviation provided a pretext for innumerable projects and experiments, some successful, others less so. Inventors gave free rein to their imagination, certain of them passionately defending on the one hand lighter-than-air balloons and airships, and others heavier-than-air planes and gliders. Proponents of the latter type included Wilbur and Orville Wright who, after numerous test flights during 1903, set a new record the following year when they flew a complete circle of over 1,200 metres. The Wright brothers devised an “instrument” watch with attachments joined to the case, the first known model of its kind. It housed a chronometer movement by VACHERON CONSTANTIN and can be clearly seen strapped above the knee of the pilot at the commands of his plane. In Paris, the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, dapper in his dress coat, starched collar, white gloves and boater, held the city enthralled. Before making the first public flight in Europe on November 12, 1906, an accomplishment that won him the coveted Prix de l’Aéro Club, he worked tirelessly on the perfection of balloons and airships. In 1904, he asked his friend Louis CARTIER to make him a wristwatch, which was more practical in his mind than a pocket watch. Considered the prototype for the CARTIER Santos model which was launched in 1911, the result was a legendary watch with its own unique aesthetics. Like Edmond JAEGER, official watchmaker to the Navy, Santos-Dumont realised that the future of air and maritime navigation lay in the transmission of time signals by wireless telegraphy, prompting him to invest in a radio receiver. As in the days of coastal navigation, the first pilots—such as Louis Blériot who made his pioneering Channel crossing on July 25, 1909 at a speed of some seventy-five kilometres per hour—navigated by sight. Like automobile drivers, they made do with a watch that only gave the time, worn strapped around the thigh or over the sleeve of their flying suit. The first nonstop flight across the Mediterranean by Roland Garros on September 23, 1913 and the first transatlantic crossing with stops by three seaplanes in May 1919 opened the way for further exploits. Soon, pilots were confronted with the same problem as sailors, namely how to calculate their position at a given moment, but in a much shorter interval due to their speed. In the early 1920s, Lt. Commander Philip van Horn Weems of the United States Navy developed a type of wristwatch for pilots, known as an hour-angle watch. All the watch manufacturers then specialising in aeronautics, including IWC, JAEGER-LeCOULTRE, LANGE & SÖHNE, LONGINES for Charles A. Lindbergh and VACHERON CONSTANTIN proposed models that could be used to determine longitude. They enabled pilots to calculate longitude using universal time to define the Greenwich Hour Angle of the sun, taking into account the equation of time, that is the difference over the course of the year between apparent time and mean time. In 1935, IWC developed its “special watch for pilots” (Spezialuhr für Flieger), better known as Mark IX and fitted with a rotating bezel. Mark XI, with its characteristic triangle at twelve o’clock, was launched in 1948. Protected against magnetic fields, it became the archetypal watch for civil and military pilots, although for political and economic reasons certain airlines such as Swissair preferred to sign contracts with watchmakers in their own country. In the very early 1960s, an altimeter was fitted onto a wristwatch. However, other than for leisure flying, mechanical aviator watches have lost the importance they once enjoyed, being replaced by programmed navigational methods.

Time on the move :

Master watchmakers have always sought to accompany travellers on their different journeys. The coaching watch as well as the alarm that lights a candle at the required hour provide two such examples. As transportation routes developed towards the end of the eighteenth century,
other solutions were proposed, including a striking clock inside a carry case. Abraham-Louis
BREGUET took this timepiece and transformed it into an elegant parallelepiped model whose often complex and intricate mechanism could be admired through its crystal sides. In the 1830s, this initial concept with its Empire-style decoration gave rise to simplified but always beautifully finished pieces that over time have lost none of their charm, as illustrated by this refined model, the work of the talented watchmakers at LANGE & SÖHNE. In the early twentieth century, CARTIER devised an extravagant barometer-clock for automobiles. VAN CLEEF & ARPELS transformed a lady’s purse clasp into a shuttered watch inspired by a car’s radiator grille. The jeweller also created a piece called “la scintillante”, sculpted from rock crystal and easily transportable. CARTIER’s quarter-repeater travel clock, together with “envelope” and table watches crafted by PIAGET show how beauty and practicality can be combined. All these pieces were designed for the comfort and pleasure of aesthetes who wished to recreate some of their chosen lifestyle in the luxurious cabin of an ocean liner, train, airship or plane and, on arrival, in their hotel room. Time, seen as the fourth dimension, might have at first appeared to be a matter for philosophers. In reality, on ships, planes or in cars, time—and how to measure it—was very much a concrete notion upon which everyone’s safety depended. Hence, a watch had to remain clearly visible for drivers and pilots, whether fixed to the dashboard, instrument panel or steering wheel, or strapped round the pilot’s leg. Watchmakers adapted wristwatches to suit different means of transport, guided as much by aesthetics as by ergonomics. Watches for motorcyclists had a sloping dial, their case being deeper at twelve o’clock than at six. Watches for drivers were designed to be worn on the side of the wrist, such as this model by CARTIER and another by VACHERON CONSTANTIN ; an elegant way for drivers to read the time without taking their hands off the wheel.

Time in distant lands :

The explorations and discoveries of the late fifteenth century generated trade and exchanges between continents, and this naturally led to curiosity about actual time in far-off lands and the desire to determine the exact moment at which an event took place thousands of kilometres away. Already in the eighteenth century, Master watchmakers such as Rouzier & Melly of Geneva were creating instruments that indicated local time in several major cities around the globe. They prefigured the watches displaying universal time that appeared after the earth’s division into twenty-four zones. Scientists and scholars, alerted to a particular event, could observe an astronomical phenomenon or continue an experiment while taking into account the time differences between colleagues and themselves. The Parisian watchmaker Anquetin built on this idea for his invention—patented in 1856 with four amendments—of a watch “giving the time in each country”. The spherometer is a variation of the same principle, though impractical to read with its dials on opposite sides, one showing the hours, the other the minutes—all local—in various cities of the world. However, these inventions were too advanced for their era, and “world time watches”, as they came to be known, only emerged with the expansion of ocean liners and trains. Their main dial showed the time in the owner’s location—for example, Montevideo on a watch by GIRARD-PERREGAUX, together with the time in San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, New York and Paris. The introduction of universal time in 1884 prompted Genevan creator of watches and automata Emmanuel Cottier to revive Anquetin’s ideas. His son Louis (1894–1966) made his first model adapted to this global conception of time for Baszanger, a jeweller in Geneva. He went on to specialise in this type of piece, supplying the most prestigious names of the day, including VACHERON CONSTANTIN and CARTIER. In the 1960s, JAEGER-LeCOULTRE created the Memovox Worldtime watch, which combined universal time with an alarm function. Its principle has lost none of its relevance, providing a source of inspiration for other watchmakers, such as BAUME & MERCIER, at the beginning of the third millennium. In 1990, the Géographique by JAEGER-LeCOULTRE became the first watch to give the time in two zones and in twenty-four major world cities, in addition to possessing a power-reserve function that is essential to its self-winding mechanism. In 1998, the manufacture successfully incorporated the Géographique’s multiple functions and three time zones into the Reverso Géographique. Instead of universal time, some wearers prefer to read the time in a given number of zones on separate dials: three for this rare platinum model with a single mechanism by CARTIER ; two for these watches with twin movements by PIAGET and BAUME & MERCIER, the former distinguished by its hardstone dials, characteristic of PIAGET in the 1970s, the latter sporting the functional silhouette of the Hampton watch, immediately associated with this brand. In 1989, AUDEMARS PIGUET chose separate dials to display two time zones for a single movement, while PIAGET opted for twin hour hands with a single minute hand and a single seconds hand. In 2000, BAUME & MERCIER launched the Capeland with an alarm and second time zone by means of an aperture.

The water-resistant watch :

Of all the fundamental improvements made to watches, water resistance is the most recent. It was only on February 24, 1897 that Henri Guye of Vouvray in France filed a patent for a pocket watch case with sealed joints at strategic points: the back, glass, winder and hand-setting button. His was the first public addressing of the question of overall water resistance, although VACHERON CONSTANTIN had already been discreetly working on resolving this problem. In 1898, the manufacture successfully launched the Imperator, which took its name from “impermeable”, a term that has now been replaced by water-resistant. In the first decades of the twentieth century, only a few watches combined water resistance and form, and rare were those that showed such understated elegance as this CARTIER model with its twin case. The majority conformed to the strict specifications of national naval forces. The United States Army adopted a wristwatch with an anti-reflective, water-resistant case and push-button winder from circa 1915. In 1938, IWC built an “observer’s watch” (Beobachtungsuhr) for the British Navy on a pocket calibre. This was transformed into a marine chronometer with the addition of a seconds hand. The long-standing collaboration between OFFICINE PANERAI and the Italian Naval Ministry produced Radiomir watches, compasses and depth gauges, all intended for Italian navy commandos. They are recognisable
by their functional design, but especially by their large Arabic numerals that glow in the dark
thanks to the brand’s specific technique using a reservoir of luminescent substance.

Fine watches for land, air and sea, symbols of the modern man :

In the second half of the twentieth century, both the wearing of wristwatches and the perception and measurement of time underwent a transformation. As researchers sought out new technologies to meet the needs of the advances in maritime, air and space navigation, so the boundaries of mechanical watchmaking were constantly pushed back. JAEGER LeCOULTRE again took part in the Observatory competitions that had been discontinued during the war. Successful pieces included its Calibre 170, the only tourbillon movement to be made by the manufacture until the Reverso Tourbillon watch in 1994; it triumphed four times in chronometry trials. In early 1957, the company began plans to introduce to its range models with a rating certificate; less than a year later, the Geophysic was launched, named in honour of the International Geophysical Year—a vast scientific event initiated by the United States. On December 16, 1958, two Geophysic chronometers were presented to W.R. Anderson and J.F. Calvert, commanders of the Nautilus and the Skate, the first submarines to voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic under the Arctic ice pack. The year 1965 saw GIRARD-PERREGAUX’s launch of its celebrated Gyromatic HF chronometer, which made thirty-six thousand vibrations per hour and featured a simple, efficient and reliable self-winding system, thanks to which small watches could be produced. In addition to its technical progress, the watch increasingly emerged both as a platform for artistic expression and as a social statement. Traditional Swiss manufactures responded with watches that they associated with a particular activity or lifestyle. The Cricket Nautical by VULCAIN sounds an alarm to indicate surfacing time while a graduated disc shows decompression stops and times. In an entirely different vein, the Royal Oak, which AUDEMARS PIGUET launched in 1972, was the first watch to combine sport and luxury (ill. 82). Deep One by IWC, which features a depth gauge, and the Capeland S by BAUME & MERCIER were both designed with experienced divers in mind. AUDEMARS PIGUET’s Royal Oak Offshore Alinghi, with its dual time, calendar and power-reserve indicator, commemorated the winner of the 2003 America’s Cup. The chronograph continues to attract a large following of connoisseurs, regardless of which sport they may, or may not, play. The MONTBLANC Sport Chronograph Flyback with self-winding movement features a flyback function. Also known as “retour en vol”, the flyback function represents a significant gain in time, and therefore security, for pilots as a single push resets the seconds hand, which immediately begins timing again. With its self-winding TimeWalker chronograph, MONTBLANC appeals to those who appreciate functional, legible timepieces, while PARMIGIANI FLEURIER’s Toric Chronograph and Toric Rattrapante models demonstrate a global approach in which technology—simple and split-seconds, self-winding and hand-wound movements—and aesthetics play an equal part. Functionality seems to take second place in this marriage of originality, beauty and craftsmanship, even if time can be measured to a tenth of a second—a unit that sports federations for a long time refused to acknowledge. Neither modern telecommunications nor spectacular travel reports have lessened our desire to encounter new people and see new horizons. The Star Réveil Automatic and the Radiomir GMT Alarm watches by MONTBLANC and PANERAI respectively are personal objects that the traveller takes pleasure in adjusting, in an intimate moment between wearer and watch, for a personalised wake-up call. Through the timelessness of the perpetual calendar, Master watchmakers are able to detach themselves from man’s activities on land, at sea or in the air, and tend towards a dimension in which the beginning meets the end. Whether with its first watch featuring a perpetual calendar and the world’s flattest mechanism or its model with equation of time, sunrise and sunset, AUDEMARS PIGUET enters a cosmic dimension from where the Master watchmaker can observe the earth’s rotation. It is this very earth, whose ocean currents and indomitable winds raged against navigators as they sailed towards new lands, that scholars were able to plot thanks to precision timekeeping. By dedicating its Mercator watch to one of the very first cartographers, Master watchmaker VACHERON CONSTANTIN surely reminds us how timekeeping on land engendered timekeeping at sea and later in the air.