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The Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque

“My God – it’s full of stars!” – 2001, A Space Odyssey

Jack Forster11 Min ReadAug 10 2023

The Reverso is a watch with one of those universally known origin stories – during the winter of 1930-1931, a traveling Swiss businessman named César de Trey happened to attend a polo match at a British officer’s club. It is probably worth mentioning that 1930 was also a watershed period in Indian history. 1930 was the beginning of a period of civil disobedience and increasing calls for Indian self-rule, starting with the Salt March in the spring of 1930, which was a protest against the British salt monopoly. The fact may seem inconsequential to our story however the fact that India was a British subject is the reason that Englishmen were playing polo in India in the first place. Polo, in any case, is like international geopolitics a sometimes violent game, and de Trey according to Jaeger-LeCoultre, had the idea of preventing watches worn during the action by making wristwatch with a reversible case. He is supposed to have approached LeCoultre & Cie, who hired an engineer named René-Alfred Chauvot to design the case.

The Reverso was something of a niche model for much of its history – the Art Deco design began to seem slightly dated post-World War II and the reversible case was expensive to manufacture, although the watch was produced in a range of different styles and metals. The Reverso was produced more and more sporadically and finally, it was dropped altogether although it got something of a second lease on life in when JLC’s Italian distributor bought the last 200 Reverso cases, installed movements, and sold them out, in 1975. The Reverso was re-introduced in the mid-1980s (with, for the first time, a water resistant case) and as mechanical watchmaking got out from under the Quartz Crisis, it became a flagship model for Jaeger-LeCoultre.

The Reverso is usually thought of as an exercise in elegant simplicity, but in a twist, it turns out to be a great vehicle for complicated watches as well – in fact, some of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s most complicated watches have been Reversos, including the Reverso Hybris Artistica 179 and Reverso Hybris Mechanica 185 (“hybris” is the Greek root of hubris but so far Jaeger-LeCoultre seems not to have incurred any divine retribution, or at least not so you’d notice). The Hybris Mechanica series of high complications kicked off in 2003 and there are now close to twenty in all. In this week’s installment of A Watch A Week, we’ve got a watch which was the immediate predecessor to both – the Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque, also known as the Hybris Mechanica 3.

A Celestial Reverso

The Grande Complication à Triptyque was created as part of JLC’s 75th anniversary and launched at the SIHH in 2006; it was the talk of the show and one of a number of semi-experimental, highly complicated watches launched during the early 2000s. Luxury watch brands had been competing to produce more and more complex and more and more unusual complicated watches for nearly two decades by then; one of the major shots fired was the launch by Patek Philippe of the clock-watch Caliber 89 in 1989.

Zoom InThe Vacheron Constantin 250th anniversary Tour de L’Ile

In 2005, Vacheron Constantin had celebrated its 250th anniversary with the Tour de L”ile wristwatch – a highly complex tourbillon, minute repeater, and perpetual calendar watch, with astronomical indications. It won the Aiguille d’Or at the GPHG that year, so Jaeger-LeCoultre had its work cut out for it to outshine or even equal in impact, what Vacheron had done.

JLC decided to make an ultra-complicated watch based on the most distinctive design in its repertoire: the Reverso. The Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque was by far the most complex Reverso ever seen and it was a somewhat more focused watch than the Vacheron Tour de L’Ile, which was a more traditional (appropriately for Vacheron) take on a watch that assembled a number of different complications. The Vacheron was not exactly a standard Grande Complication as it is traditionally defined – for one thing it did not have a rattrapante chronograph – but it was in the same lineage of very classic, haute horlogerie complications going all the way back to the Henry Graves super complication.

Zoom InAll three faces of the Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque

The Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque, on the other hand was an exercise in exploiting the possibilities of the basic Reverso concept to both display information but also to only reveal it “on demand,” you might say. The watch has three distinct faces for three different types of information.

The First Face

The first face shows civil time, and there is a day/night indication, a very discreet power reserve indication in the upper left corner, and a very large one minute tourbillon visible through an aperture in the lower left.

Zoom InReverso Grande Complication à Triptyque

The tourbillon has an unusually shaped cage – sort of a mantis ray shape – and also functions as a running seconds hand.

Zoom InReverso Grande Complication à Triptyque

The escapement is a little difficult to see, as it’s on the underside of the carriage, but it is an unusual one – an invention of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s, which they called the Ellipse Isometer Escapement.

Zoom In

The diagram shows the escapement inverted. The escape wheel is on the left and there is a spiral spring detent in the upper left corner, pressing on a jewel that locks the escape lever. The balance in the diagram is swinging clockwise, and the pin on the balance roller has just made contact with the jewel at the tip of the pivoting lever to which it and the locking jewel are attached. This causes the pivoting lever to turn counterclockwise, unlocking the escape wheel, which pushes on the impulse jewel on the roller, impulsing the balance. This is essentially a variation on the chronometer detent escapement and as far as I can remember the idea was to have the advantages of the chronometer detent escapement – direct impulse to the balance that doesn’t need oil, as a lever escapement does – with a more secure locking system, as the biggest problem with the chronometer detent escapement is that if it gets a jolt it may accidentally unlock. I don’t know how successful the design was, ultimately – certainly, JLC didn’t go on to industrialize it – but it’s an interesting example of the extent to which, at the time that the Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque launched, it was almost obligatory to try something novel with the escapement.

My guess  is that the Ellipse Isometer Escapement wasn’t suitable for wider use due to its delicacy and complexity, and the fact that it is, as far as I can remember, not self-starting (the Audemars Piguet escapement used in the ChronAP had the same issue) but it’s one of the most distinctively different elements in this distinctively different grand complication.

The Second Face

The second face is found on the reverse side of the swiveling case, and is used for a full suite of astronomical complications.

This is where things start to get downright romantic, at least if you find celestial complications evocative of the spirit of harmony in the heavens that we used to call the music of the spheres.

Zoom In

There are two hands on the second dial. One, in silver, shows sidereal time on a 24 hour scale. Sidereal time, or “star time” is the time it takes for one of the fixed stars in the heavens to return to the same position. This is actually a more accurate representation of the time it takes for the Earth to turn once on its axis than a solar day. Thanks to the fact that the Earth is moving along its orbit at the same time it’s rotating, there is a parallax effect that requires the Earth to over-rotate slightly in order to return the Sun to its zenith position, so a sidereal day is actually slightly shorter, by about four minutes, than a solar day.

The second hand, tipped with a small Sun, shows the Equation of Time. The length of a solar day varies over the course of a year by roughly fifteen minutes plus or minus and this is thanks to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and the inclination of the Earth’s axis. An intuitive way to think of the Equation of Time is that it shows you the difference between the time as read off a clock showing local mean solar time, and the time shown by a sundial. The Equation of Time was important historically for setting clocks accurately and it’s not unusual to find pendulum clocks with a table for the Equation of Time pasted on the inside of the case.

There is also a planispheric star chart, which shows which stars are visible in the sky at any given moment during the day or night. The star chart disk is, like the sidereal time hand, geared to rotate once per sidereal day. Surrounding it is an indication of the passage of the signs of the Zodiac – the current sign is indicated by a moving red line that passes through the signs once per year.

Zoom In

Finally, to the left and right, there are indications for sunrise and sunset. The second face of the watch is nothing less than a complete representation of the passage of the Earth around the Sun, as seen from the perspective of a terrestrial observer.

The Third Face

The third face of the watch – and this is its most unusual feature, along with the Ellipse Isometer Escapement – is on the upper side of the case carrier, and this was the first time that JLC had used that particular piece of real estate to convey information. On the third face, there is a complete, instantaneous perpetual calendar.

Zoom In

The date is shown in a sector at the bottom of the frame, with an indication of the moonphase directly above. The day and month are shown as well, and at the very top there’s a small window for the Leap Year indication.

You might be wondering how JLC fit a perpetual calendar into the case carrier – is there an entire separate movement somehow buried in there? The answer is that there’s a tiny pin in the swiveling case which snaps out once per day at midnight, and presses through a hole in the inside of the carrier to advance all the perpetual calendar indications simultaneously. The calendar module is only 1.7mm thick, which is essential in making this highly complicated watch practical to wear.

The Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque is a beautiful watch from an aesthetic standpoint, but it’s also a marvelous piece of very ingenious miniature engineering.

The Heavens On Your Wrist

The Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque is on the large size all right, but given the number of complications and the case construction, the dimensions aren’t excessive – 34.5mm across, 18mm thick, and 54.5mm lug to lug. To say that it makes an impact on the wrist is to say nothing at all – the size, complexity, and materials (there are over 700 components and the case is in platinum) make this a watch with a lot of heft in every sense of the word.

Zoom In

The watch was a limited edition of 75 pieces and at launch, was the most expensive Reverso ever made, at $375,000. It’s obviously an extraordinary watch in every sense of the word, but it’s also a snapshot of a very bold and adventurous time in modern high-end watchmaking, when the top-tier brands were competing, and competing fiercely, to outdo each other in overt demonstrations of determination and ingenuity. It’s also a watch with a lot of symbolic layers, literally and figuratively. I said earlier that the Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque was a slightly more focused watch than the Vacheron Constantin Tour de L’Ile and that focus lies in its concentration on providing a comprehensive horological representation of the celestial mechanics of the Earth’s orbit. That, of course, includes the perpetual calendar, which is made necessary by the fact that the Earth does not take a whole number of days to complete its orbit. The use of the Reverso concept, and the fact that you can see all the information on all three faces without taking off the watch, gives it an almost theatrical feel – an operatic presentation of the cosmos in three acts.