A Watch A Week With Jack Forster
The 1916 Company (WatchBox)
Introducing The 1916 Company. A New Era in Watch Collecting.
Welcome to our new series, A Watch A Week, 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 .
Are shaped watches on the comeback trail?
Right now, every single watch A. Lange & S?hne makes, is round. The same is true at Vacheron and at Audemars Piguet (at least, if you think of the Royal Oak as a round-ish watch, which I do) and at Rolex, Omega, and … well, the list goes on and on. With the exception of a few holdouts – usually collections with lots of history to back them up, like the Reverso – rectangular mechanical watches seem to be even more of a minority than ever. Even rarer are rectangular watches with rectangular movements, which used to be a mainstay of Patek’s historically important Gondolo collection, currently down to just three watches, all of which use the round caliber 215.?
The rectangular caliber 25-21 REC was a beautiful piece of work but it’s no longer in the Patek catalog. Rectangular watches, especially with rectangular movements, seem to mostly exist nowadays as modern versions of legacy watches, like the Reverso and the Tank (and it’s square, not rectangular, but I feel like NOMOS deserves an honorable mention for the Tetra).
Read the full article on the blog.
Today we’ll be looking at the Audemars Piguet Star Wheel.
To say that Audemars Piguet is today best known for the Royal Oak is like saying that Apple is best known for the iPhone – it is a statement so obvious it doesn’t need to be said at all. It remains to be seen whether or not the Royal Oak and its cousin, the Offshore, as well as the Code 11.59 collection will remain as the only two pillars of the company’s production in the future medium or long term but things seem unlikely to change any time soon and there does not in fact seem to be any particular reason for them to. Certainly there is not any financial incentive.
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Read the full article on the blog.
The first Invention from Greubel Forsey is still one of the most exciting tourbillons of all time.
Let me say at the outset that for a significant percentage of the population the expression, “exciting tourbillon” is something of an oxymoron but that is the wonderful thing about enthusiast communities – you get your highly niche obsessions validated. In the case of the Double Tourbillon 30o I think if you’re ever going to call a watch exciting, this is where to do it.
Read the full article on the blog.
A possibly perfect pure expression of the art of the tourbillon, from Patek Philippe.
The origin story of the tourbillon isn’t quite as well known as Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite, but it’s close. The inventor of the tourbillon, Abraham Louis Breguet, developed it as a way of coping with the fact that a watch will run slightly fast or slow depending on its position. A tourbillon is a watch in which the regulating components – balance spring, balance, and escapement – are placed in a rotating cage that turns in the same plane as the movement. The idea is that with a tourbillon, instead of having different rates in the four vertical positions (crown up, crown down, crown left, and crown right) you will instead have a single?average?rate for all the vertical positions.
Read the full article on the blog.