For Quill & Pad’s themed “Ladies’ Week” in my role as resident collector, my thoughts turned immediately to that other collector in my life: my charming wife. MrsG is perhaps most enthusiastic about her collection of Southwestern Native American arts and jewelry, but let’s get started with a look at her interesting watches, which include excellent examples from Jaeger-LeCoultre, Blancpain, Alain Silberstein, Audemars Piguet, and more.
Waxing poetically about moon phases has gotten me excited to take a trip through certain “phases” of engineering excellence to discuss the most accurate moon phase complications in a wristwatch today. Here we bring you the eight most accurate moon phases fitted into a wristwatch. These are examples that far exceed the norm when it comes to engineering, precision, and finely toothed gears. Join us on this odyssey through space and time.
The multi-axis regulator of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Gyrotourbillon has been fascinating watch aficionados since the introduction of the Gyrotourbillon 1 in 2004. In this video by The WatchesTV, Stéphane Belmont, international marketing and product director of Jaeger-LeCoultre, explains some of the thinking and history behind this groundbreaking line of timepieces.
You often see watches signed “LeCoultre,” but very rarely simply signed “Jaeger.” The reason is that Edmond Jaeger of Paris and Jacques-David LeCoultre of Le Sentier, Switzerland merged their businesses in the early 1900s and it became Jaeger-LeCoultre in 1937. While we often see the”LeCoultre” name on dials, we very, very rarely see one signed “Jaeger.” So, take a good long look, you may never see one again.
“Whether collecting art or watches, when I fall in love with something, then I need to understand, I need to research deeply,” Mo Coppeletta explains. “You may have taste, but if that isn’t backed up with knowledge then it is superficial.” Coppoletta was wearing an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar Skeleton. “It’s my summer watch,” he commented. What else does he own and how did he get into collecting watches?
While we see Polaris as the North Star for now, our descendents 20 generations down the road from now will not. This is due to an astronomical process called precession. There is something that mimics precession that you can wear on your wrist and pass on to those descendents: the Jaeger-LeCoultre Duomètre Sphérotourbillon Moon, the most recent addition to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s already stacked Duomètre collection.
The long-awaited recent release of the ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ trailer delights me to no end (it is also nice to see that Ben Affleck might actually turn out be a decent Batman; the few seconds of him in the trailer were shockingly good in my opinion). Without further ado, I’d like to call to memory a few timepieces that have commemorated Batman in recent history by Jaeger-LeCoultre, Romain Jerome, and Montegrappa.
For the past five years, I’ve had the delightful experience of traveling to Switzerland with several friends to experience SIHH week, before finishing up with a Friday night dinner at which we review our impressions of the week by answering what watch we thought was best of show at SIHH; what was the worst watch; what current-production watch that we saw at any event during the week would we buy if money were no object; and what current-production watch did we see that we would buy with our own money?
As the SIHH celebrated its 25th anniversary, other milestones were also taking place. IWC celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Portugieser, Vacheron Constantin celebrates its 260th anniversary, and A. Lange & Söhne respects the 200th anniversary of founder Ferdinand Adolph Lange with models including the amazing Zeitwerk Minute Repeater.
The moon and its astronomical implications was the overriding theme for Jaeger-LeCoultre at the 2015 edition of the SIHH (Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie) in Geneva. And there was no better way to illustrate this than to introduce new variations on some of the Le Sentier-based brand’s most complicated, astronomically-themed timepieces.