Cool Complications
In watchmaking, complications are functions that go beyond mere time telling—think stop watches and moon phases. As technically daunting as they are in a mechanical timepiece, some watchmakers are pushing the envelope with unique twists and even exploring new frontiers.
Marking its 30th anniversary, Roger Dubuis honors its late namesake founder with a 28-piece release of Hommage La Placide Perpetual Calendar Biretrograde ($137,000), reviving the biretrograde perpetual calendar from Dubuis’ earliest watches. Perpetual calendars are devised to theoretically run without adjustment until the year 2100, tracking day, date, month, leap year and moon phase. Dubuis added a dynamic spin using double retrograde displays for the day of the week and date that advance along a linear arc until they instantly snap back to the starting point at the end of the cycle. Housed in a 38-mm pink gold case, the watch features the founder’s signature Leman Blue dial.
Bovet’s new Récital 30 ($98,000, in titanium and $140,000, in red gold) streamlines last year’s mind-boggling Récital 28 Prowess 1. The latter watch put the idea of tracking multiple time zones on steroids by solving the Daylight Saving Time (DST) issues that have previously plagued world-timers. (DST doesn’t start on the same date across the globe and some countries don’t reset their clocks at all.)
Both watches use a roller system to accurately display the 24 main global time zones during the year’s four varying periods. Each of the 24 time-zone rollers, marked with city names, has four positions corresponding to each period, while two smaller rollers adjust the time period and the central 24-hour world disc. Even New Delhi, with its 30-minute offset, is accounted for.
Press the top button and each roller crisply turns 90 degrees, so all 24 time zones are set to each designated time period. The bottom button advances the central 24-hour world disc by one hour to simplify setting the entire world’s time.
Urwerk took a rocket-science approach to its unprecedented UR-10 SpaceMeter ($94,000) in sandblasted titanium. Its three sub-dials track the distances the earth travels across the time-space continuum.
At 2 o’clock, the Earth counter measures every 10 kilometers that the Earth travels in its daily rotation in increments of 500 meters; at 4 o’clock, the Sun counter advances in 20-kilometer steps registering every 1,000 kilometers the Earth travels on its solar orbit; and at 9 o’clock, the Orbit counter combines both trajectories inscribing every 1,000 kilometers of rotation and 64,000 kilometers of solar orbit on two synchronized scales. To infinity and beyond!
