The Greubel Forsey
Double Tourbillon 30º

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.

The tourbillon has had a long, and very interesting, but also very up and down history. A lot of us know the beginning of the tourbillon’s story – it was invented (as far as we know) by Breguet and patented in 1801. We’re often familiar with the history of the tourbillon post-Quartz Crisis as well, or at least over the last couple of decades – there was a period between the dawn of the 21st century and the 2008 financial crisis during which it seemed absolutely everyone simply had to have a tourbillon in their product lineup. 

Before then, however, tourbillons were one of the rarest kind of watches. There are not a lot of resources for the tourbillon-curious out there but one book of magisterial thoroughness as well as forbidding density  is Reinhard Mies’s Das Tourbillon, which as far as I know has never been translated into English (an incentive for the eager horologist to learn German if ever there was one). Mies estimates that there were less than 300 makers capable of manufacturing tourbillons prior to 1960 and the total number made between 1801 and 1945, is less than a thousand – possibly as few as six hundred or so watches.

The tourbillon’s surge in popularity post-2000 is partly thanks to renewed fascination with mechanical horology, but it’s also due to the fact that very precise CNC multi-axis machine tools had begun to make them easier to produce – too easy by half, some of us felt. In 2016 TAG Heuer introduced the Carrera Heuer 02T, which was a chronometer certified tourbillon retailing for $15,950. This tourbillon-on-the-cheap prompted none other than Patek Philippe’s Thierry Stern to irritably remark, “It’s nearly a joke to me…if they’re willing to try to kill the quality of the Swiss product, I think they’re on a very good track.”

However, a high-grade hand-made tourbillon remains an item of interest to both collectors and watchmakers. After all you can buy a hand-wound time-only watch for under a thousand bucks or you can buy one for a hundred thousand dollars and it’s always as well to bear in mind that with watches as with everything else, it’s both what you do, and very much how you do it.

Which brings me around to Greubel Forsey and the Double Tourbillon 30º. The Double Tourbillon 30º was Greubel Forsey’s first watch, in 2004 and it was, and is, a watch hard to get in both senses of the term. The 1916 Company’s Tim Mosso put it very well in an article for Quill & Pad, remarking, “As in politics, where the most effective message is the one that fits on a bumper sticker, watch marketing often falters when a product demands too much background and exposition to explain to casual buyers.” The problem with the Double Tourbillon 30º is that understanding it is a little bit of work, although I would argue that it more than repays the effort in terms of not only appreciating that particular watch, but also understanding tourbillons overall. 

The tourbillon was invented to solve a problem discovered by Breguet (and a lot of other people) in pocket watches. The issue is gravity. A watch will run slightly faster or slower depending on its position relative to the pull of gravity, with the most extreme variation found between the vertical positions and the horizontal positions. Breguet’s idea was to put all the actual timekeeping components – the balance, the balance spring, and the escapement – inside a rotating cage which turns in the vertical plane of the watch. Instead of four different vertical rates (traditionally watches were and are timed in four vertical positions) you get a single average rate and if you then adjust the rates in the flat positions (dial up and dial down) to match, you should have a perfect timekeeper.

The tourbillon is controversial because for it to deliver, it has to be constructed extremely precisely. In an ordinary watch, the power from the mainspring flows directly to the escapement through the gear train but in a tourbillon, the mainspring barrel has to not only impulse the balance, it also has to move the entire mass of the balance, balance spring, escapement, and tourbillon carriage every time the escapement unlocks. That is a lot of extra energy drain and a lot of extra potential noise in the system and you have to work very hard to construct a tourbillon that actually delivers on the intentions of Breguet’s design.

The Double Tourbillon 30º is intended from the ground up to be a top quality tourbillon, but more than that, it is also designed to take a technical solution originally designed for a pocket watch, and adapt it to a wristwatch. There had been wristwatch tourbillons before – Omega and Patek Philippe both made wristwatch tourbillons in very small numbers in the mid-20th century – but these were not in principle different from pocket tourbillons. The Double Tourbillon 30º is one of the first tourbillon wristwatches to adapt the tourbillon to a wristwatch.

The wristwatch, unlike a pocket watch, does not spend most of its time in either a vertical or horizontal position, but instead, in a number of intermediate positions depending on the wearer’s activity. This means that the advantages of a traditional tourbillon are somewhat nullified. The Double Tourbillon 30º addresses this by inclining the balance at a 30º angle, and also by nesting the inner tourbillon carriage inside an outer carriage. The inner carriage rotates once per minute and the outer carriage, once every four minutes. This ensures that the balance, balance spring and escapement are almost never in any of the more extreme positions where positional rate variation would be greatest. It’s worth pointing out that this is not just a tweak on Breguet’s original design – it’s a major conceptual upgrade as well, since the idea is not to just average the rates in the most extreme positions, but to ensure the timekeeping components never find themselves in those positions to begin with.

The Double Tourbillon 30º also incorporates other features intended to improve chronometry, including a Phillips overcoil (the mathematically derived version of the Breguet overcoil) and two fast-rotating mainspring barrels which provide a more consistent torque curve over the 3 day power reserve.

It is also one of the most flawlessly finished watches ever produced – hand-finishing at Greubel Forsey is so good that it sometimes overshadows the company’s technical achievements, but with the Double Tourbillon 30º you can have your cake and eat it too. It’s a common misconception among even experienced collectors that traditional hand finishing is found in general among most luxury watches but this is not the case and there are only a few manufacturers who treat every component of their movements with the same pains taken by, say, Philippe Dufour.

There is hardly another watch out there with so much real horological content. The Double Tourbillon 30º is the result of an obsession and the outcome is a watch which will reward thought, withstand delighted close inspection, and provide emotional satisfaction and intellectual stimulation long after many more highly hyped (and in some cases, more expensive) watches are gathering dust or producing nothing more than towering boredom and buyer’s remorse. Yes, it has one flaw, which is that it requires some explanation and any product you have to explain is a harder sell. But if genuine watchmaking ingenuity in a long tradition which includes some of the greatest watchmakers on the planet is your brand of vodka, the Double Tourbillon 30º might be for you.