In the early 1960s, engineer Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Martin came up with “keep it simple, stupid,” which became better known by its acronym, KISS. Watches that employ clever levers and clearly adhere to the KISS principle are always something that can turn me into a giddy fan boy, and one such piece is the Konstantin Chaykin Genius Temporis. Heck, even the name implies some genius.
In early June 2018, nearly 200 people from all corners of the planet traveled to the the quiet Vallée de Joux in Switzerland to celebrate independent watchmaker Philippe Dufour’s 70th birthday party. Ian Skellern thought the occasion might make for a nice film and asked a few old friends to help out.
Louis Moinet’s intergalactic Spacewalker celebrates the historic 1965 flight by cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, when he became the first human to venture outside a pressurized capsule and into the void of space, barely making it back. This timepiece (and story) will brighten your day!
Late in 2015 the news came through that A.H.C.I. co-founder Svend Andersen had sold his company. But how did Andersen get here? Let’s take a quick tour of 53 years’ worth of independent horology the Danish way to find out, which includes an extravaganza of worldtimers, unusual erotic watches, and even poker-playing dogs.
“What, another watch?” she almost screamed in disbelief no sooner than WMMT had opened the front door to his little love nest. Rewind to last week. Hehad been looking for a Roger Smith Series 1 for some time now, and Jones, his watch dealer, happened to finally locate one. WMMT thought that he had played it pretty safe, so he really don’t know how she could have noticed. But what happened next changed the rest of his life.
Strehler’s latest watch, the Trans-Axial Remontoir Tourbillon, takes his definitive style to create an even more accurate timepiece than he has made before. And since he also likes to focus on impressive mechanics, he has done it in a way that stood out among the multitude of new watches presented at Baselworld 2018.
For this edition of Behind the Lens, GaryG shares a series of photographs of one of the great watches of our time, the Philippe Dufour Duality. The Duality, with its linked twin escapements, was originally planned for production in a series of 25 watches. In a turn of events that seems almost unbelievable today, a lack of initial demand eventually led Dufour to limit production to just nine pieces.
You can like everything, but you can’t buy – or keep – everything! Inevitably, the choices involved lead at times to regrets; for GaryG, along with many of his pals, the sadness is much more often about pieces sold too soon or failed to buy rather than pieces they were sorry about buying in the first place (although surely everyone has a few “what was I thinking?” buying moments).
If you’re just beginning to collect the works of independent watchmakers, GaryG suggest that you give careful consideration to watches from Habring2, the small independent watchmaking company headed up by Austrian couple Maria Kristina and Richard Habring.
Gone but not forgotten in the minds of true watch fans, we briefly revisit the horological genius that was Dominique Loiseau (1949-2013) and his ultra-complicated 1f4.