First Impressions Of The Hervé Schlüchter L’Essentiel ‘Philosophical Regulator’
A pocket watch for the wrist.
Many years ago, when I’d just discovered internet watch forums and vintage pocket watches (at about the same time) I gave a lot of thought to what would be an ideal wristwatch – my idea of an ideal wristwatch, I should say. I wasn’t interested in a theoretically ideal wristwatch in any sense, or in prescriptive absolutes, but I wanted a watch that would have all the bells and whistles associated with both traditional craft, and also with traditional solutions to achieving precision timekeeping. High frequency movements, laser-poised balances, and exotic materials solutions need not apply. What I wanted in short, was a pocket watch for the wrist, built to the standards of a high-grade, hand-finished pocket chronometer from the late 19th or early 20th century. When I floated the idea on ThePuristS.com, the notion was admired in the abstract but several people pointed out that practically speaking, such a watch would be extremely expensive and certainly not viable from a practical commercial standpoint.
Which is why, when I saw the press release for watchmaker Hervé Schlüchter’s “Philosophical Regulator,” my hair stood on end. I thought to myself that finally, at long last, after waiting for a couple of decades, someone had at last made the willfully anachronistic pocket watch for the wrist of my dreams. After looking more closely, I still think this is true – sort of.
The Watchmaker
Hervé Schlüchter is a watchmaker who for much of his career worked as a constructor at Bovet, and who also, in preparation for the creation of the L’Essentiel Philosophical Regulator, studied movement finishing with Philippe Dufour, and guilloché with one of the best known experts in engine turning, Georges Brodbeck. Schlüchter has said that the impetus for the creation of the L’Essentiel watch was a loss: the death of his father, who had asked Schlüchter to make a pocket watch for him but which Schlüchter had been unable to complete before his father passed away.
The idea to make a wristwatch inspired by high-grade vintage pocket watches, Schlüchter says, led him to consider the attributes of such watches and he decided to create a wristwatch that as much as possible, respected the proportions – in particular, the proportions of the movement – as well as the craftsmanship and technical solutions found in chronometer-grade pocket watches built at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
At the same time, Schlüchter wanted his watch to explicitly express the events which had inspired it. Eventually he decided to create a trilogy of watches called “The Tree Of Life,” with the themes of childhood, parents, and grandparents – the here-and-now, development of broader vision, and wisdom – expressed in each watch. L’Essentiel is the first watch in that series.
The Watch: Case And Dial
L’Essentiel is a classically proportioned watch by intention. The case is 39mm x 10.37mm, in stainless steel, with a press-fit caseback. The watch announces its philosophical aspirations immediately. The dial is regulator-style, with a large central heat-blued minute hand and blued steel seconds hand. The hours are read off a 24 hour disc, in aventurine, with a gold-plated Sun and silver-plated Moon. The philosophical side of the dial is expressed not just in its design, but also in a couple of Latin mottos – “Hodie Nunc” or “here now” for the Sun, and “Amor & Gratia” or “love and thanks” for the Moon.
Dial construction is very elaborate. There are two stainless steel frames – one around the aperture for the aventurine 24 hour disk, and one around the grand feu enamel seconds sundial; the minutes track is in enamel as well. I think there are more sharp inner and outer angles in the two steel frames than in the movements of a lot of so-called luxury wristwatches.
The central part of the dial is in mailechort, or German silver (the “silver” part of the name is a misnomer, although a time-honored one; German silver is an alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel, frequently used for movement plates and bridges in high-end watchmaking). The elegantly elongated lugs and large crown give the watch a very substantial appearance, in keeping with the idea of making a watch intended to be passed on from one generation to the next, and to be serviceable essentially indefinitely.
The Movement
Unsurprisingly, the movement has had effort lavished on it every bit as much as the dial – more so, I’d say. The first thing I noticed was the sheer size of the balance, which takes up almost the entire radius of the watch and whose circular inertial weights barely clear the pivot of the center wheel. The layout in general is designed to show off traditional movement finishing techniques, and to make as much of the going train and other components visible as possible.
The bridges are a combination of steel and maillechort, with the latter used for the bridge for the crown wheel, ratchet wheel, and barrel, as well as the balance cock and cock for the escape wheel. The warmth of these components contrasts with the polished steel of the going train cocks, which have rod-shaped extensions allowing almost the entire wheel train to be seen. The train wheels have double countersinks, and the crown wheel and ratchet wheel feature wolf’s teeth, which are a traditional type of tooth profile historically used in top quality pocket watches. These are a type of cycloidal gear teeth and the idea is to prevent sliding friction where the teeth mesh – the tooth profiles are designed to roll across each other instead. The movement features some of the largest train jewels and deepest countersinks I’ve ever seen in a modern watch movement and although judging finish from photos of a prototype comes with a lot of potential caveats, it looks as if no effort has been spared.
The balance, balance spring and escapement are deliberately evocative of the pocket watch tradition as well. The lever is what’s called a “mustache” type, thanks to the mustache-shaped extensions to the left and right of the main shaft of the lever. These have not been used in watchmaking for many decades – the original intention was to counterbalance the mass of the lever fork and give the lever better poise. The watchmaking industry abandoned this type of construction for several reasons – for one, the added inertia of the poising extensions became less practical as higher frequency movements became prevalent and for another, they add considerably to the time and effort necessary to make a lever. It’s worth mentioning that this sort of lever is not exactly an off-the-shelf component.
Neither is the balance. The watch beats at 18,000 vph – the classic pocket watch frequency – and has four large inertial weights along the rim, as well as two smaller timing weights at each balance arm. The balance is designed to visually recall a specific type of balance produced for a few decades in the early 20th century. This is the so-called Guillaume balance. The Guillaume balance is named for Charles Guillaume, a Swiss physicist who discovered that certain nickel steel alloys are very stable in terms of any changes in size when ambient temperature changes, and his alloys were the forerunners of modern self-compensating Nivarox-type balance springs. The so-called Guillaume balance was a split, bimetallic compensating balance, like the steel and brass balances that preceded it, but it was designed to eliminate something called middle temperature error. This is an extremely arcane subject but at one point, eliminating middle temperature error was the primary problem horologists were trying to solve.
The balance spring in the L’Essentiel watch isn’t blued carbon steel, but it looks like it, in keeping with the notion of creating a kind of mechanical illustration of a high grade chronometer movement. The swan’s neck fine adjustment mechanism is not for regulation – it’s there for making fine adjustments to the position of the outer stud (attachment point) of the balance spring.
Tradition And Innovation
L’Essential is a fascinating watch on a number of levels. Purely as a manifestation of craft, it is as appealing as anything else out there, and it puts Hervé Schlüchter immediately in the company of independent watchmakers pursuing the art of the time-only watch at the highest level. And the appeal to what are, frankly, archaic technical details is very attractive to me – you just don’t see mustache-type counterpoised levers every day. Or ever, really.
The watch illustrates a very classic, deliberately old-fashioned way of doing things, but it also illustrates something else, which is the somewhat conflicted relationship both modern haute horlogerie and modern watch collectors have with tradition. We all want the best of both worlds, but at some point you can no longer have your cake and eat it too. I would have loved it if Schlüchter had really taken the ball across the finish line and used an actual, bimetallic Guillaume-type balance, but I suspect this would have added enormously to the time needed to make the watch and to its cost. And let’s face it, how many CHF 78,000 watches can you sell in this day and age on the strength of a middle temperature error solution?
And there is already a lot going on with this watch. The physical expressions of its philosophical aspirations have made for a watch that really wears those aspirations on its sleeve and there is a part of me that wonders whether or not those aspirations would have been better served with a little less overt visual rhetoric. But you can’t really judge that sort of thing from pictures. It looks like there might be a little too much of a good thing, but the corollary to that, of course, is that there have to be a lot of good things going on in the first place, and this is certainly a watch worth seeking out and seeing in person – if you can.
The Hervé Schlüchter L’Essentiel Philosophical Regulator: case, stainless steel, 30M water resistant, 39mm x 10.73mm, with maillechort, enamel and steel dial, guilloché decoration, polished steel frames. Movement, caliber HS-01, 34.6mm x 7.38mm with stop seconds, Gullaume “homage” balance, wolf’s teeth on ratchet wheel and crown wheel, running at 18,00 vph in 27 jewels. 60 hour power reserve. 14.10mm balance and Phillips overcoil balance spring. Limited edition of 25 pieces. For more info, visit Les Ateliers Hervé Schlüchter.