Independent’s Day: Five Independent Watches That Were Really Revolutionary
I only regret, that I have but one watch budget to blow for my collection.
It is on the day on which Americans celebrate Independence day, natural to consider independent watchmaking – what it is, and how it has come to be what it is today.
Independent watchmaking is hard to define. There are small, low production brands that make hand finished watches and which show no interest in producing at scale; there are microbrands offering relative bargains with, often, attractively different designs, and then there are very large brands which at least inasmuch as they are not owned by a larger group (for now) are technically independent as well, with two of the most famous examples being Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe.
Neither of the two latter brands are scrappy small batch independents, but both are as independent, de facto and de jure, as any other, smaller independent brand. It is easy to get the impression given how large the gap looms between what we now think of today as independent watch brands, and those brands which are part of groups (the Big Three are Richemont, Swatch Group, and LVMH although there are other smaller groups; Rolex, technically, might be considered a group, at least inasmuch as it owns Tudor and Carl F. Bucherer). Mergers have however been a part of the Swiss watch industry for many years, starting with the establishment of SSIH and ASUAG, which were the ancestors of the modern Swatch Group and which operated as cartels, to increase efficiency in the industry overall. And brands we think of as independents can find themselves with larger companies or groups taking part ownership (Chanel, for instance, has a 20% minority stake in F.P. Journe; Voutilainen has acquired Urban Jürgensen, and so on).
However, the allure of a small independent brand continues to be quite powerful; independents offer a sense of closer proximity to the person or persons actually creating the watches, and the whole David vs. Goliath part of the independent narrative can be very compelling as well. And in many instances, independent brands offer a unique identity which stands in contrast to what can seem the somewhat homogenous watchmaking you can get from large luxury groups, however unfair the impression of homogeneity can be – Louis Vuitton watches are made by one of the most powerful companies in the world, but they offer, especially in recent years, a value proposition at least as indiosyncratic as any available from an independent brand.
Independent horology has in fact, become (as so often happens with revolutions and revolutionaries) become in a way, its own institution and the performance of highly regarded independent watch brands is as much a bellwether of the appetite for fine watchmaking overall, as the performance of major group brands. But independent horology has also produced, in the last thirty years, some real revolutions of its own. The degree of cross pollination between independent brands and larger, more powerful, more visible brands is impossible to quantify but the influence of independent watchmaking far outstrips the size of its market share. But the fundamental difference is that with group brands, the general rule is that taking risks is a game not worth the candle. With independent brands the opposite is true: taking risks is a matter of survival.
The Ulysse Nardin Freak
This is in a way the watch that set the stage for almost all of the really crazy, out-there, risky independent brands and watches that followed after. Ulysse Nardin, by the time the first Freak appeared in 2001, had already broken a lot of conventions. The company, which was founded in 1846, had originally made its name as a maker of marine chronometers, although the company despite the fine quality of its watches and wristwatches, ended up declaring bankruptcy in 1978. Rolf Schnyder bought Ulysse Nardin lock, stock and barrel in 1983 and he partnered with the polymath historian, physicist and watchmaker Dr. Ludwig Oechslin. The collaboration produced some quite fantastic high complications, the most memorable of which are the Trilogy Of Time astronomical complications. There were also some remarkable chiming complications, including minute repeaters with striking jacks on the dial, like the Jungle Minute Repeater.
But the watch that really put UN on the map, then, now, and forever, was the Freak. At a remove of a quarter century, it’s hard to convey just how much of an impact the Freak had. No one had ever seen anything like it. The Freak was and is a watch that does not fit into any conventional classifications – the going train, and escapement were all mounted under one single bridge that rotated once per minute, acting as the minute hand; the was an hour hand as well, driven off the rotating movement, and the mainspring took up the entire diameter of the case. (The original design that became the Freak was developed by Carole Forestier, who would go on to roles as movement designer for Cartier, and now TAG Heuer).
The Freak was also one of the very few watches of its time to introduce a new escapement – the Dual Direct escapement, which had two escape wheels providing direct impulse to the balance. As if that were not enough, the Freak was also the first watch of any kind to have silicon components, which were created in partnership with CSEM (Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology ; in French, Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique).
The Freak was the first real hyperwatch – groundbreaking in a technical sense, yes, but also a deliberately extroverted act of radically re-imagining one of the most conservatively designed products on the planet, the mechanical watch. There is hardly a hyperwatch that has come afterwards that does not owe something to the Freak.
The URWERK UR-103
The 103 was not the first watch from URWERK but it was the one that introduced the general design language that would, after the debut of the 103 in 2003, continue to be developed by URWERK right up to the present. The company’s first watch was the UR-101, which was a modernist and minimalist take on the wandering hours complication, in which a moving hand with the number of the hour on it, tracks across a sector of the dial over the course of an hour, disappearing at the end of the hour and replaced by the next hour numeral in due course. The 101 came out in 1997 but it was the 103 that put the company on the map.
URWERK has used the wandering hours complication, with very few exceptions, in all of its watches ever since. In doing so, the company demonstrated that alternative displays of the time do not have to be thought of as one-offs, or as setting limits to design in watchmaking. The UR-103 and the subsequent wandering hours watches from URWERK demonstrated just how much freedom could be found in finding alternative methods for displaying the time, and helped to show that just because a complication was hundreds of years old, was no reason to think it had to look it.
The MB&F HM 1
Speaking of revolutionaries who have become institutions, there’s Max Büsser, and there’s MB&F, and there is the very first of the Horological Machines. MB&F was founded in 2005 (which is the year that the URWERK x Harry Winston Opus 5 came out). The watch would have been very much out of the ordinary just based on the specs – a 7 day central tourbillon, automatic, running out of four mainspring barrels. It was however the construction of the movement and the watch which really made it a revolution. The watch was (and it has this in common with the URWERK UR-103 and the Freak) built around the movement but the movement had been reorganize to support the overall design in a way more extreme than either. The symmetry of the watch was exploded down the centerline and while technically bilaterally symmetrical, HM 1 felt only temporarily so; there was something about the two intersecting circles of the watch that gave a feeling of a single celled organism about to divide.
The URWERK UR-103 and the Freak both shattered conventions of watchmaking. HM 1 shattered any remaining preconceptions anyone might have had about the overarching supremacy of a case based on a single regular geometric shape – and to this day, challenges everyone who followed, who want to do a radically different watch design, to put their movement where there mouth is.
The F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance.
There are so many complicated watches from the second have of the 1990s and the first half-decade of the 2000s which you could point to as breaking new ground in complicated watchmaking; there are relatively few timepieces from that era which represent complications explicitly intended to explore possible refinements to chronometry. The tourbillon in this period was in its ascendancy and the tourbillon, for all that it is in many respects largely decorative today, was nonetheless intended to improve precision. The only large-scale experiments in improving precision were the attempts to begin to integrate quartz components into mechanical watch movements, and the attempt on the part of Omega, to industrialize the co-axial escapement.
Exploring the unexplored – the genuinely unexplored – happens rarely in mechanical horology, which is today in terms of technical advances, largely an incremental business. In deciding to take up the challenge of creating a resonance watch – one in which two balances oscillate in synchrony with each other, thanks to sympathetic vibrations shared between the two, and transmitted through the movement plate, and therefore offer better rate stability – F.P. Journe also decided to take up an avenue of research which had lain almost totally fallow since Breguet produced a handful of resonance pocket watches in the early 19th century.
The Chronomètre à Résonance has since been joined by only a tiny group of additional timepieces which also claim to harness the resonance effect. But it has cast a much longer shadow than the number of actual watches inspired by (or competing with) the Journe Resonance might make you think. The Chronomètre à Résonance is a sort of dare, taken up by very few since, to look deeply and with passion and curiosity into the history of watch and clockmaking. It was close to two centuries before Journe took up the challenge of making a resonance wristwatch, and his decision to do so sets the bar, in independent horology and elsewhere, for accepting in the present the most daunting of challenges from the past.
The Dufour Simplicity
It is interesting to think about the reverence – there is no other word for it – that collectors have for Philippe Dufour. It is also interesting to think about his output. Dufour is demonstrably a master of complicated watchmaking; he has both pocket and wristwatch grande et petite sonnerie watches to his credit, and as well, he is the inventor of the Duality, a double balance watch with the two balances linked by a differential that produces an average rate between the two, more precise than either could achieve solo.
These are all extraordinary watches, but they are not what Dufour famous. For most of his career, Philippe Dufour has made one watch, which is the Simplicity. For almost a quarter of a century, Dufour has been carefully, methodically producing a handful of watches a year, for a total of just a little over two hundred. The industry has been through economic and stylistic paroxysms a-plenty since then, but Dufour seems to be perfectly content and perfectly fulfilled by honing his craft, one slow watch at a time, year after year and decade after decade.
So why is it that Dufour’s Simplicity watches are so desirable? It is of course the creamily flawless movement finishing – every other part of the watch is flawlessly executed as well but the quality of the movement finishing has set the standard for the rest of the industry, independent or otherwise. This is not to say that then or now, Dufour is the only person in Switzerland capable of producing an immaculately hand-finished movement, but it is also true that at the turn of the century, and ever since, he has been a tireless educator about, and proselytizer for, understanding what the real standard for movement finishing ought to be.
Independent horology today is full of examples of independent watchmakers determined to fill what seems to be a rapidly growing market, which is the market for hand-finished watches that are done to a very high standard, and which represent real mastery of traditional watchmaking crafts. If there is a market for such things, and there is, there is much owned to an affable, pipe-smoking gentleman from Le Solliat, up in the Vallée de Joux. Is making a beautiful, hand-finished, top quality time only watch revolutionary? It’s revolutionary if a lot of the rest of the industry is trying to get away with cutting corners.