Nestled in among the mountainous green forest overlooking the valley’s larger towns of Fleurier and Môtiers is one of the area’s historical attractions: a stone castle whose earliest sections were built in the early fourteenth century. Since its purchase in 2006, the Château de Môtiers has been fully renovated by Bovet owner Pascal Raffy and now serves as the brand’s headquarters and assembly workshop.
Type 20 is a specification by the French Ministry of Defense for the standard-equipment pilot’s watch chronographs. Unlike German pilot’s watch specifications, those for the French Type 20 are not clearly documented but are rather based on common characteristics shared by various manufacturers. Bhanu Chopra explains what makes these watches so sought after and goes through the main models and characteristics.
Both Joe Biden and John F. Kennedy share an obvious love of Omega watches. But there are more similarities between these two presidents than their Omega watches. And there is one more cool thing you may not have known about one of Joe Biden’s daily wearers: it was a Bond watch.
Back in the 1970s, Steve McQueen was the king of cool: he was a world-famous movie star and a prominent racecar driver. So it’s no surprise that the Heuer Monaco he wore in the film ‘Le Mans’ instantly became a hit. But what happened to the Monaco models used on set and where are they today? Chris Malburg interviews the propmaster to find out.
The grandeur of Place Vendôme is hard to match, and to say that about a location in a city like Paris is quite a statement. Follow Martin Green’s tour of the horological history of the square and discover what makes this place so special.
Watch- and clockmaking has a long history in Germany, as evidenced by the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century timepieces from the Nuremberg/Augsburg area and the academic discussions of Peter Henlein, who is said to have made the world’s first pocket watch around 1505. But the country’s roots in great watchmaking do not stop there: Elizabeth Doerr takes us on an historical journey of Glashütte, the birthplace of modern Germany’s fine watches.
Glashütte celebrates 175 years of watchmaking and unveils a memorial statue of Walter Lange. Elizabeth Doerr was one of the few journalists at the COVID-19-restricted event and shares a recap of it with us here.
Close to 120 years after Abraham-Louis Breguet patented the tourbillon, master watchmaker Alfred Helwig (1886-1974) created a “flying” tourbillon at the German School of Watchmaking in Glashütte. The flying tourbillon became somewhat characteristic of Glashütte and lives on in a few very special watches today. Who was Alfred Helwig? Find out here.
Here we present the full three-part series about the making of Derek Pratt’s John Harrison H4 reconstruction, originally written by Roger Stevenson, chief watchmaker at Frodsham.
If you’ve been lucky enough to travel to the “four corners” area of the southwestern United States (where U.S. states Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico “meet”), then you may have seen or even visited some of the cliff dwellings built by ancient native peoples. Read on to find out what we know about how this ancient tribe now known as the Ancestral Puebloans kept time and why.