A Watch A Week With Jack Forster
The 1916 Company (WatchBox)
Introducing The 1916 Company. A New Era in Watch Collecting.
Welcome to A Watch A Week, our series in which we take a close look at one piece from our?WatchBox?collection that deserves more than a passing glance. Explore the most recent editions below by?Jack Forster.
The De Bethune DBS came along fairly early in the history of the company — it was introduced in 2005, just three years after Denis Flageollet and David Zanetta founded the company, in 2002. It was, however, a major break with the company’s original design language, although as we’ll see, the family relationship between the first, more classically influenced De Bethune watches and the DBS is closer than you might think at first glance.?De Bethune?launched in 2002 with a design language that seemed very much connected with some very traditional fine watchmaking design cues — cases were round, with almost pocket watch-like dials and hands, and although timepieces like the DB1 monopusher chronograph were slightly on the large size, they were certainly well within the standards of the time, with only the bullet-shaped, or ogival, lugs to distinguish them from a watch that could just as plausibly have said Breguet on the dial, as De Bethune.
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F. P. Journe founded the company that bears his name in 1999, but by then, he was already an experienced watchmaker who had created a number of highly complex watches and clocks, including a tourbillon pocket watch, his famous planetarium for Asprey. His first wristwatch was a tourbillon wristwatch with a one-second constant-force remontoire, the first time the remontoire had ever been fitted to a wristwatch. Journe was fascinated by the horological experiments of early pioneers in precision timekeeping, including those of Antide Janvier and Abraham Louis Breguet, and was especially preoccupied by a problem both Janvier and Breguet had tackled, almost two centuries before Journe began making his own timepieces.
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The IWC Grande Complication was one of the first of a new generation of grande complication and highly complicated watches to emerge from the nearly shattered mechanical watch industry, in the aftermath of the Quartz Crisis. With the introduction of quartz watches and integrated circuit timing packages, it seemed as if hundreds of years of traditional complicated watchmaking had definitely and finally come to an end. After all, why go to the enormous trouble and effort necessary to make something as delicate, costly, and troublesome as a perpetual calendar or split-time chronograph, when you could program such functions into a chip, in a watch costing less than a hundred dollars? However, despite what Dr. George Daniels called “the electricians,” it became clear there was still an audience — and one with deep pockets — for not only mechanical horology, but also highly complex mechanical horology. Thus, some watch brands began to flex their watchmaking muscles.
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The?H. Moser & Cie. Endeavour Cylindrical Tourbillon?is an unusual watch on several counts. First, of course, it is a tourbillon and while the tourbillon exists in numbers today which would have made Abraham Louis Breguet’s wig fly off, it is still a rare mechanism. Secondly, it is a self-winding tourbillon, which is quite unusual, although not especially technically difficult – self-winding, or automatic, tourbillons have only been around since 1986, when Audemars Piguet introduced the ultra-thin (or extra-flat, if you prefer – the two terms are more or less interchangeable, although “ultra” sounds more, well, ultra) caliber 3870. This was not only the first series produced tourbillon wristwatch, but also the thinnest, right up until Bulgari broke the long-standing record in 2018 with the Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Automatic.
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