THE JOURNAL
Back in 2000, the historian Mr David Landes noted an interesting paradox taking shape in the world of luxury watches. The tourbillon, an obscure, devilishly intricate device once used to improve accuracy in pocket watches, had become fashionable in high-end wristwatches, even though on the wrist it served little practical purpose. It was complex, hugely onerous to make, and functionally pointless. “But for aficionados,” Landes wrote, “it remains the highest expression of horological technical artistry, and makers and buyers together rejoice in its fascinating, ceaseless motion.”
What was becoming true then, with Swiss watchmaking still emerging from the aftershocks of the quartz revolution, is absolutely the case today – and in spades. The tourbillon, in which a watch’s “heartbeat” workings are put beguilingly in motion within a delicate, ever-rotating carriage mechanism, has become the defining component of modern haute horlogerie. It’s a ubiquitous centrepiece for the most complicated watches from top-tier makers, a platform for incredible experimentation and creativity, and a prestige statement for the wearer.
“The tourbillon is probably the most spectacular complication you can have, because it makes you wonder, and brings animation and character to the watch,” says Mr Jean-Christophe Sabatier, chief product officer at Ulysse Nardin, whose Blast Automatic Tourbillon takes this 200-year-old concept in a distinctly contemporary direction. “Something like a perpetual calendar is highly technical, but not so obvious, whereas the tourbillon is assertive: it celebrates watchmaking.”
01.
The origins of the tourbillon
It’s down to Earth’s gravity, and the problems it caused makers of pocket watches, that the tourbillon exists at all. It’s also down to the genius of horology’s greatest innovator, Mr Abraham-Louis Breguet, who dreamed the concept up in 1795.
To understand why, we need to consider the critical parts at the heart of any mechanical timepiece: the escapement, spiral hairspring and balance wheel. In any watch – pocket or wrist – these tiny elements interact to regulate the energy that’s released through the mechanism by the uncoiling of the mainspring, converting it into lightning-fast impulses that precisely advance the hands of the watch. (We go into a bit more detail on how the escapement works here – in a nutshell, it’s what makes your watch “tick”).
But in a pocket watch, the pull of gravity could have an adverse effect on the isochronism – the regularity with which the little spring actually coils and uncoils – of those tiny pulses, to varying amounts depending on the position of the timepiece. If the hairspring is being influenced by anything, in this case, gravity pulling it in one direction, that changes how long it takes to oscillate in and out, that will result in a watch that’s not keeping accurate time.
A watch might behave very differently lying flat, held at an angle, or sitting vertically in its wearer’s pocket. Breguet’s magnificent solution was to counteract gravity by putting those regulating elements in constant rotation. He designed a revolving carriage in which these parts kept turning steadily through all vertical positions, producing an average and even rate for the watch unaffected by gravity’s drag. He patented the invention in 1801, and gave it a name inspired by its alluring circular motion – tourbillon means “whirlwind” in French.
Breguet’s invention was ingenious, but it didn’t become commonplace. Given the extreme complexity and delicacy of its construction, the tourbillon remained an interesting but niche feature of tour-de-force pocket watches. By the dawning of the wristwatch era in the 1920s, fewer than 900 tourbillon timepieces had likely ever been made. And as the move to wrists consigned the pocket watch to history, it seemed that the tourbillon was destined to go with it.
“A pocket watch sits in a single, vertical position in your pocket, and gravity would pull on it. This is what the tourbillon was designed for,” says Mr Christian Selmoni, style and heritage director at Vacheron Constantin, a company that took until 1901 to make its first tourbillon. “But on your wrist, a watch is moving all the time through every position and angle possible. For that, the tourbillon isn’t really useful.”
02.
The modern tourbillon revival
Through the middle of the 20th century, a tiny smattering of one-off, experimental tourbillon wristwatches were nevertheless made, most notably by Omega and Patek Philippe. But as a meaningful component of wrist-bound timekeeping, it was redundant. Though rather more importantly, by 1980, so was mechanical watchmaking, as cheap, accurate, battery-powered watches swept the world.
Of course, that crisis would lead to Swiss watchmaking’s grand rebirth as a booming nexus of craft, style, ingenuity and exclusivity; complicated watchmaking became ever more prominent, and with it, the tourbillon began its unexpected resurgence.
In 1986, Audemars Piguet produced the world’s first series-produced tourbillon wristwatch, a dainty and astonishing number that, though exceedingly slim, was self-winding, and had its tiny tourbillon revealed through an opening in a corner of the oblong dial. No one assumed it did much for accuracy, but as a statement of new beginnings and horological intent, it made a splash. In 1990, Breguet itself put out a spectacular tourbillon wristwatch, followed by Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Girard-Perregaux in 1991 – each of them with the tourbillons boldly on show through the front of the watch, advertising the prowess and audacity of the watchmaking involved.
“The tourbillon now is really a visual expression of the watchmaker’s art,” says Selmoni. “It’s fascinating to see it moving, but you also know that even to build it, the watchmaker has to have incredible skill and so many years of experience, because it can only be done by hand.”
03.
The technical challenges
For what’s more or less the platonic ideal of the classical tourbillon wristwatch, you can turn to Vacheron Constantin’s elegant-and-then-some Traditionnelle Tourbillon Automatic 41mm. The tourbillon occupies the entire lower portion of the dial, with its rotating carriage in the shape of a Maltese cross (a Vacheron hallmark). Within it, the gold balance, spiral hairspring and escapement perform their oscillations as the whole assembly revolves. It also brings the remarkable hand-finishing techniques that are otherwise visible in the movement to the front of the watch. Notice the horizontal bridge that holds the tourbillon in place. Its curved, tapered shape is achieved entirely by hand, filing the metal down before bringing it to a magnificent mirror-polished finish.
Want to know just how finicky a tourbillon is to make? The tourbillon cage that sits at the heart of Girard-Perregaux’s La Esmeralda Tourbillon squeezes in no fewer than 80 components, even though it weighs just 0.3 grams. The watch recreates the famous and unique “Three Gold Bridges” design of the firm’s renowned series of 19th-century tourbillon pocket watches, with the tourbillon and gear train sitting astride a trio of huge, gleaming arrow-headed bridges. Having established the Three Gold Bridges as one of the seminal modern tourbillon executions in 1991, the brand has more recently taken it in more contemporary directions with its Flying Bridges series.
The tourbillon may be an anachronistic hangover from the days of pocket watch chronometry, but Switzerland’s makers have restlessly and relentlessly pushed it in new directions. None more so than Greubel Forsey, the company whose 100-or-so watches a year mix crafted opulence with extreme scientific inquiry at a level arguably no other maker can match. Its GMT Quadruple Tourbillon, for instance, features two sets of two tourbillons, with one turning at an angle inside the other. Why? Greubel Forsey maintain this delivers improved chronometric performance, but let’s face it, the answer is also because they could. And in modern watchmaking, that’s very much enough.
The prospective tourbillon buyer today can choose between “flying” tourbillons (in which the cage is connected to the watch on a single side, and thus appears to be hovering above the movement); multiple tourbillons in a single watch; multiple flying tourbillons, as with the futuristic showpieces of Roger Dubuis, a brand whose modern identity has been forged around the charismatic swirl of the tourbillon; and even tourbillons rotating on more than one axis and thus appearing to tumble in 3D, as with Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Gyrotourbillon models.
What you want from a tourbillon is simply a question of the level of horological fireworks you want squeezed into a wristwatch. Whatever your answer, the tourbillon will assuredly bring it. Quite what Breguet himself would make of it is anyone’s guess. But perhaps he’d be amused that his invention for improving timekeeping now represents, more than any other horological invention, the moment watchmaking’s achievements could be measured out in terms of artistry rather than accuracy.