An ochs und junior Moonphase, An Exercise In Radical Reductionism

ochs und junior (yes, they style their name in all lower case; it seems to be that kind of Monday) was originally founded in 2006 by Ludwig Oechslin, Beat Weinmann, and Kurt Koenig, and its brief was to give Dr. Oechslin, the master horologist who had produced some of Ulysse Nardin’s most complex watches to date, free reign to realize his particular vision of mechanical watchmaking. Oechslin is probably unique among modern watchmakers in terms of erudition. As a young man, he spent four years restoring the astronomical Farnese clock in the Vatican Museum, which had been constructed for Dorothea Farnese von Pfalz-Neuburg, the Duchess of Parma and Piacenza; the clock was given as a gift to Pope Leo XIII in 1903. The Farnese clock is one of the most complex astronomical clocks ever constructed, and his work on it led to his Doctorate in Philosophy, History of Research and Scholarship (Theoretical Physics) and Astronomy from the University of Bern, and I think he is the only watchmaker whom I have ever heard of with a PhD from a theoretical physics department. He was discovered by the man who revived Ulysse Nardin after buying it in 1983 – Swiss industrialist Rolf Schnyder, for whom Oechslin would go on to produce many highly sophisticated astronomical complications, including the Trilogy of Time, which included the Tellurium Johannes Kepler.

At ochs und junior, Dr. Oechslin set out to overturn just about every expectation which the enthusiast community had of him from his previous work with Ulysse Nardin. First, there was the aesthetic. The aesthetic of ochs und junior might better be described as an anti-aesthetic, in that Oechslin completely rejected any and pretty much all of the conventional ideas of fine-ness in watch design and production. Instead, he chose an industrial aesthetic, in which the tooling marks which most luxury watch brands are at great pains to remove, are deliberately left as reminders that, as a friend of mine once memorably remarked, watches are machines. Movement components as well were well finished functionally but unadorned in terms of any sort of conventional finishing, and ochs und junior watches are probably the only watches which have been referred to as “Brutalist” which actually fit the requirements of that school of architecture, with its emphasis on unfinished raw materials.

Oechslin also set out to create complications which were both optimized functionally, and reduced to the bare necessities mechanically. The first ochs und junior perpetual calendar came out relatively recently, in 2016 (having typed that, I have realized that 2016 was eleven years ago). This was a perpetual calendar degree zero, as you might say; the absolute mechanical minimum necessary to implement the four year rule of the Gregorian calendar. (As an aside, it is often said and written that perpetual calendar watches implement the Gregorian calendar, which is actually not true, as most omit the one hundred and four hundred year rules that distinguish the Gregorian from the preceding Julian calendar). In contrast to the elaborate complexity of the traditional perpetual calendar, with its hydra-headed Grand Lever for coordinating the perpetual calendar indications, its 12 or 36 step program wheel, and its multitude of extra springs, jumpers, pawls, levers, and screws, Oechslin came up with a perpetual calendar which added just nine additional parts to the base caliber.

This same philosophy underlies the even more radically simplified ochs und junior moonphase, which adds just five additional parts to the base caliber, for a moonphase which is accurate to a precision of one days’ error in 3,478.27 years.

The design of the watch not only shows the age and phase of the Moon; it also shows the date, and the implementation of the moonphase display is also a kind of tellurium – that is, an astronomical complication which shows the relative positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. It’s not a full tellurium, which shows the progression of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun over the course of a year, but it does accurately depict the relative positions of the three heavenly bodies.

Here is how it works. The moonphase disk, which is calculated for a synodic lunar month of 29.5306122449 days, rotates once per lunar month, carrying two disks representing Moon. The Sun is represented by a gold disk at 12:00, and the center of the dial represents the position of the Earth. One Moon disk is in gold, and represents the side of the Moon illuminated by the Sun; that is, the conventional moonphase. As the disk rotates, the entire gold disk is visible when it’s on a straight line between the Sun, Moon and Earth, as this is when the entire bright side of the Moon is visible in the night sky. As the disk turns, the amount of the gold Moon disk visible gradually diminishes, until, when the disk is entirely hidden, we reach the New Moon. At this point, the Moon is directly between the Sun and the Earth (and depending on the precession of its orbit, you may or many not get a solar eclipse at that moment as well) and only the dark side of the Moon is visible.

There is also a black disk on the moonphase disk, which is 180º opposite the gold disk. This black disk represents the dark side of the Moon, and when it’s fully exposed at 6:00 on the moonphase aperture, it’s the New Moon.

All this is achieved, and to a very high precision, with some very carefully calculated epicyclic gearing. The complexity of the problem is heightened by the fact that the length of a synodic month can vary by as much as ± 20 hours, due to gravitational variations caused by periodic changes in the Moon’s orbit, the changing gravitational pull of other planets, and other factors, so the watchmaker in search of a high precision moonphase must settle on their best closest approximation of the average.

In an interview with Europa Star, Oechslin had this to say about his approach to complicated watchmaking:

“My pieces seem simple, but the intellectual path to a simple build is extremely complex. Making things simple is not the same as simplifying. For instance, it might mean designing a single part that can perform three different tasks and solve three problems.”

The date is read off a series of apertures, spaced at five day intervals around the dial.

This system may seem at first impenetrably resistant to legibility, but in fact, once you know how the date indication has been set up, it is pretty easy. The stick markers on the dial correspond to ten minute intervals over an hour, and two hour intervals over a 12 hour period, but they also serve as markers for five day intervals in the calendar. And so if, for instance, the orange dot for the current date is directly opposite the 20 minute/4:00 marker, it’s the tenth of the month; if the dot is visible in the second aperture past that marker, it’s the 12th, and so on.

And all of this from just the few extra parts shown above, which includes the fixed inner facing gear teeth on the back of the dial (that’s the back of the dial on the left).

This is one of the most genuinely original wristwatches of the last twenty or so years, and it’s all the more intellectually rewarding because it does exactly the opposite of what most complicated watches do: relies on less to do more. It is of course natural for watch companies to proudly tout the high parts count of some of their high complications and it is certainly true that it is impossible to radically simplify certain complications beyond a certain point (I think that it is not for nothing that ochs und junior has never tried to bring their philosophy about complications to, say, a minute repeater). But it is unquestionably a fundamental principle of good engineering, that the fewer parts there are, the less there is to go wrong; the odds are less and less in your favor the more complicated things get, as a rule. ochs und junior’s astronomical complications succeed as watches not just because of their radical engineering simplicity and ingenuity, but also because that approach is directly embodied in the aesthetics of the watch as well.

ochs und junior has always thought of itself as a sort of halfway house for dramatically different watchmaking as you can see in the cartoon produced for their first website.

But behind the tongue in cheek self image, there is some of the most deeply thought through horology in the history of mechanical watchmaking, with an intellectual lineage going back to the Farnese clock and even further, to the first great astronomical horologia of the early Renaissance. It’s a watch that sits on the cutting edge, even today, of horological innovation, but it’s rooted in some of the earliest attempts at rendering the universe in mechanical form as well.

The ochs und junior moonphase in titanium, 42mm, is available from The 1916 Company; see it right here.