All that flies is not satellites

Sometimes life brings you unexpected gems, especially if you are in the right place at the right time.

So one day I met the owner of the Geneva watch company Sarcar, a very jovial and nice Singaporean whom between very generous lunches, dinners and visits to my crazy space laboratory made the longest possible mental leapfrog jump and understood that “all that flies is not satellites”.

His motivation: he needed a new twist… to impress his clients.

And this brought me in the luxury watch business, a place where like no other place, literally, “Time is Money”.

In that world you do not wear a watch because you care about the time, but you do it because you want to show off your money, and you can do it much better than in other ways, since normally you have to leave a Ferrari in the parking place and a yacht in the harbor… you cannot bring them to a business meeting or on the golf course… or through the customs. But if you can carry it, I was explained, it helps with certain kinds of business facilitation.

Although I am mostly indifferent to material wealth, I sincerely appreciate many kinds of aesthetic beauties, among which I rate complicated mechanical devices among the best and so I was very intrigued by the request:

“Can we have a 1 carat diamond flying freely inside a watch ?”

“Can, can” was my immediate Singlish answer, and I set to work.

After signing a simple agreement and two months of work in my laboratory I had a functioning prototype that offered the view of a 1 carat (fake) diamond moving inside the watch in a chaotic manner as if it was freely flying around its well defined position in the case.

I brought it to Basel, during the unbelievable and famous Basel Fair, to meet the rest of the Sarcar company, witch by the way was created by an Italian in Geneva long time ago.

Drawings were exchanged, prototype dissected, plan made, patent drafted, and “The Twist” was born and presented at the next Basel Fair.

Of course, costing literally much more than its weight in gold (and diamonds), it needed heavy loaded wrists and I do not think many people were able to get it.

But so is life, even if my material gain was really very little, out of such experience I received the largest wealth: a practical introduction in a new field, a set of very nice and interesting people, and a lot of knowledge that I used later on in my own way: an incredible wealth to bring through any customs of life.