Four New Watchmaking Records For 2024, And What They Mean

If you happened to be at Watches & Wonders this year, or if you watched or read any of the coverage, you probably ran across the word “incremental,” being used to express the view that this was – well, an incremental year, one in which the wow factor was a little on the low side. Normally Watches & Wonders, the biggest trade show of the year, and one which attracted 49,000 visitors and 54 exhibiting brands, creates a lot of buzz and this year was no different, and yet the collective consensus, at least from the enthusiast press, was that it was a quiet year from a news standpoint. After the exuberance of the COVID era watch boom, perhaps a slightly less crazy year was in order in any case. However, if you look squarely at the facts, the 2024 edition of Watches & Wonders was a showstopper in at least one way that counts, and that’s records set in technical watchmaking.

No fewer than four major records were broken.

Vacheron Constantin led the way with the Berkeley Grand Complication, which set a new record for total number of complications in any watch ever made. I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to say that it made things like the Graves Supercomplication look simplistic, but when you have a timepiece with 63 complications and one which, moreover, manages to implement a mechanical perpetual calendar based on the highly irregular behavior of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar, you’ve got something that you’d think would make people sit up and take notice. It’s not that it didn’t get covered – every major enthusiast publication and plenty of mainstream publications covered it – but for some reason the coverage felt slightly perfunctory, as if the sheer complexity of the watch had induced a sense of collective exhaustion about the problem of explaining it.

Although IWC’s record for complicated watchmaking involved far fewer parts and far fewer complications (to be fair, any watch has far fewer complications than the Berkeley Grand Comp) it was still a gasp-inducing accomplishment. The company took its Kurt Klaus-designed perpetual calendar and added to it a new moonphase gear train with a claimed (I say “claimed” but number one, I have no reason to doubt the claim and number two, nobody’s going to be around long enough to check) precision of one day’s error in 45 million years, in the aptly named Portugieser Eternal Calendar.

This is in contrast to a normal moonphase complication, which accumulates one days’ error in about two and a half years. The watch got attention not just for the record but also for the price (a friend of mine who is both a watch lover and a humorist, pointed out that a conventional Portugieser Perpetual, albeit in white gold, is a $47,500 watch and since the Eternal Calendar is $155,000 (price was announced as “on request” at the fair, but writing for Forbes, Roberta Nass reported that figure) that gives you a price difference of $107,500 bucks, which works out to $35,833 and change for each of the three additional gears in the moonphase train … so maybe we’ve got two records since those must be some of the priciest gears in watchmaking. Still, though, a 45 million year precision is nothing to sneeze at.

Finally, we had two new records set for ultra thin watchmaking. Bulgari, stirred to action by the release of the Richard Mille UP-01, which took the record for world’s thinnest watch away from the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Ultra just four months after the latter was released, found a way to shave one tenth of a millimeter off the Ultra’s 1.80mm thick case – which frankly I would have thought un-shave-able – for the Octo Finissimo Ultra COSC, making it exactly 0.05mm thinner than the RM UP-01, which is 1.75mm thick.

The other record was set by Piaget, who after sitting out several records for ultra-thin watchmaking from Bulgari, asserted their presence as a maker not just of over-the-top exercises in solid gold flexes, but as an historically important maker of ultra-thin watches as well. The Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch was a record-setter when it was released, with a case just 2.0mm thick, and somehow, Piaget managed to shoehorn a flying tourbillon into the watch, with no increase in thickness at all.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like an incremental year to me. In any case the development time for watches, especially complicated watches (and ultra-thin watchmaking is often considered a complication in its own right) is long enough that it’s not as if the industry could have collectively decided 2024 was going to be incremental. There’s also the fact that the year is still fairly young and I would bet fifty thousand balance springs that some of the major players are keeping their powder dry for later in the year. At the same time, though, whenever records are set, it’s never off base to ask, who are these records for, and what do they really mean – and in this case why did four world’s records at a trade show, which often don’t have even one, get bundled into an overall sense that this was an incremental year?

First of all, there is the obvious point that purely from a cost standpoint, as well as from a rarity standpoint, these are not the watches that are going to make a difference in most people’s lives. They’re definitely making a difference in some people’s lives but a lot more of us are affected by a new steel sports watch from Tudor than by a carriage clock sized pocket watch with 67 complications which undoubtedly cost tens of millions, and took over a decade to produce. Still, as Tim Mosso mentioned during a Madison Avenue Watch Week panel we hosted last week, you go to the car shows to see the Lamborghini and the dealer to buy a Ford, so you don’t need to be a client for any of these four watches to find the achievements noteworthy.

Secondly it is fair to wonder at what point the whole thing starts to become a little abstract. Bulgari for instance is I think this year partly a victim of its own success; if you break one record after another, year after year, eventually people start expecting it and tend to stop feeling halted in their tracks with amazement. A moonphase precise to one day in 45 million years lands differently than one accurate to one day in, say, 122 years, which is itself now so commonplace and has been for so many years, that it never excites any comment at all anymore. Moreover, 122 years is something a human being can relate to – 45 million years is simply too many to feel real; humans are notoriously bad at really grasping the magnitude of large numbers. And after all these years of pushing the envelope for ultra-thin watchmaking, it’s easy to feel as if the goal of thinnest watch – of any type – is starting to become a little abstract as well; more an exercise for materials scientists and CAD than for watchmaking.

Still, I think these records are worth noting and applauding. For one thing, although the tools and materials may have changed, the basic challenge of trying to squeeze ever more extreme records out of a technology that is now over five centuries old is still fascinating to watch. At the very least it is hard to think that in setting new records, brands are driven by a profit motive; watchmaking is fundamentally an emotional as well as a technical and artistic enterprise and enlarging its boundaries is, I’d argue, not just a nice thing to do but actually essential to the health and long-term interest of the whole enterprise. It’s rather like competitive motorsports or really, competitive any kind of sports; as techniques and materials improve, the margin for victory gets narrower and narrower but that just makes the competition even more keen and requires even more ingenuity. Four new world’s records – if this is an incremental year, give me incremental every time.