The holy grail of quick readability for a chronograph is centered, concentrically mounted hands. But making the displays concentric increasingly complicates the center stack of indicators and their staffs or requires the gear train to run alongside the center and display the time elsewhere. The Fabergé Visionnaire Chronograph solves this issue and many more to become one of most interesting chronographs on the market today.
A brand wholeheartedly committed to carbon development is Officine Panerai with its new research-and-development-inspired timepiece, the Lab-ID Luminor 1950 Carbotech 3 Days. And Panerai is so confident in this watch that the brand offers an incredible 50-year warranty!
Pinball machines may not be made in large numbers like they once were, but now, thanks to Hautlence and its cleverly conceived Playground collection, there is a brand-new pinball machine for enthusiasts – one that, of course, fits like a wristwatch.
Despite the difficulty in designing and executing a new chronograph, self-taught Japanese horological virtuoso Hajime Asaoka has created one of my favorite watches of Baselworld 2017: a self-made timer with visible mechanics.
A. Lange & Söhne always creates a new movement for a new watch, the Tourbograph Perpetual Pour le Mérite is no exception. The Tourbograph Perpetual Pour le Mérite features not only the fusée and chain, tourbillon, and split-seconds chronograph, but also adds the complex perpetual calendar and moon phase to the equation.
The Ulysse Nardin Marine Regatta contains a single mechanism that can count down from the pre-set race time and then back up as the race gets underway to make an actually useful complication for sailing regattas: the bi-directional countdown chronograph hand. Get the wind in your sails with this cool timepiece!
At Baselworld 2017 Breguet presented the Marine Équation Marchante Reference 5887, a fantastic implementation of a running equation of time combined with a perpetual calendar and the company’s signature tourbillon, making for a very impressive mechanical specialty watch.
It’s always a pleasure to discover something entirely new during Baselworld 2017, and at my last meeting of the fair, this happened again. On this occasion I was shown the best watch I had never heard of: the James C. Pellaton Royal Marine Chronometer, a shining example of haute horology if I have ever seen one.
I absolutely love negative space. And now MB&F has now created a piece where the viewer’s imagination plays as important a role as the largely empty physical structure. That creation is Destination Moon, a rocket-shaped clock made in collaboration with L’Epée 1839.
As material science progresses, the watch industry finds itself flush with ever more ways to disrupt the conventional norms of finishing and coating surfaces, many of which have persisted in traditional watchmaking for centuries. Follow me to take a look at some of this disruption and evolution, which recently culminated in the use of Vantablack.