The Audemars Piguet Star Wheel

To say that Audemars Piguet is today best known for the Royal Oak is like saying that Apple is best known for the iPhone – it is a statement so obvious it doesn’t need to be said at all. It remains to be seen whether or not the Royal Oak and its cousin, the Offshore, as well as the Code 11.59 collection will remain as the only two pillars of the company’s production in the future medium or long term but things seem unlikely to change any time soon and there does not in fact seem to be any particular reason for them to. Certainly there is not any financial incentive.

There was a time however when Audemars Piguet was better known for the diversity of its collections rather than its reliance on a single (albeit iconic) design and a big (if niche) fan favorite from those bygone days, is the Audemars Piguet Star Wheel.

The Star Wheel watches were Audemars Piguet’s take on a very old but also very niche complication – the wandering hours. It is debatable whether or not the wandering hours complication is actually a complication, as wandering hours watches and clocks only show the time and not any additional information (which is more or less the definition of a complication and the reason that tourbillons are not, by this narrow definition, complications either) but they certainly derive a lot of their appeal from making display of the time more complex than a simple hour and minute hand. Wandering hours watches and clocks show the hour on a number which passes clockwise across a sector on the dial. 

The sector is usually marked off with the minutes, so the moving hour shows the minutes as well. The complication was invented a surprisingly long time ago, by three clockmakers in Rome – Matteo, Pietro, and Giuseppe Campani, who invented it for Pope Alexander VII, who wanted a clock he could read at night. The Campani brothers’ clock was lit from inside with a candle and the wandering hour was translucent, so it was backlit and the clock was readable as long as the candle stayed lit. Today the complication remains a rarity although, notably, Urwerk has based pretty much their entire production on variations on the wandering hours complication (if you ever visit their offices in Geneva, you will be able to see a working 17th century wandering hours clock).

At AP, the wandering hours complication was born under the name Star Wheel, in 1991. The Star Wheel is so called because the wandering hours are carried on three rotating transparent disks, each printed with four numerals (3 x 4 = 12 hours) which 90º into a new position as the disk passes out of the minute arc. This brings the next hour number on the disk into position (three hours separate each hour number; one of the disks, for instance, is printed with 3,6,9, and 12). The Star Wheel watches came in a number of variations, all featuring the same basic complication and interestingly enough Audemars Piguet also used the wandering hours complication in at least one other collection – the now almost forgotten John Sheaffer collection, named for an American industrialist and collector who commissioned one of AP’s most famous wristwatches in 1927 – a repeater with each numeral replaced by one letter of the client’s name (the watch is now in the AP museum in Le Brassus). The modern John Sheaffer Minute Repeater launched in 1992 in both open and closed dial versions and it is an almost painfully beautiful watch – the same can be said for the Star Wheel watches as well.

The Star Wheel watches are all automatic (the John Sheaffer minute repeater is hand-wound, in contrast) and powered by the Jaeger-LeCoultre caliber 889/AP caliber 2124 (Audemars Piguet at the time had a 40% stake in JLC, until they sold their interest to the Richemont Group in 2000, so there were lots of synergies). They are as a group some of my personal favorites ever made at Audemars Piguet. Of course the Royal Oak is a fantastic design but Audemars Piguet used to be as notable for its variety as for the presence of Genta’s iconic design, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I miss that variety. For all that things like the Edward Piguet Tourbillon With Rutilated Quartz Mainplate are a bad match for today’s hype-watch culture, it was fun that they existed (to be fair they still exist, they’re just not being made any more). Who knows, though – as the tastes of today’s collectors continue to evolve, there might just be a time when the Star Wheel comes a bit more into its own as not only a collectible, but as a beautiful if quirky design in its own right. We live in the age of half-million dollar Cartier Pebbles, after all.

Recommended Reading: For a deeper dive on the history of the Star Wheel check out “The Story Of The Audemars Piguet Star Wheel” at A Collected Man.