Mr. Fantastic: The Amazing Stretching Hands Of The Parmigiani Fleurier Ovale Pantographe
Give a hand to one of the cleverest ideas in modern watchmaking.
The dial side of a watch is not exactly static, but sometimes the movement you do see is a little reminiscent of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace – it is an interesting exercise in a centuries long tradition but it is also highly regimented and does not vary in form. This is generally a feature, not a bug, in watch dials and hands, whose job it is to present the information an owner is looking for as unobtrusively and transparently as possible. Not for nothing is it a truism that the best user interface is the one you don’t notice when you are using it.
However, the unceasing daily round of hands of a fixed length circling a dial of fixed diameter is something to which we have become so accustomed that most of the time it never occurs to anyone to wonder about doing it differently.
The Moving Hand
Well, it turns out that back in 2011, Parmigiani Fleurier actually asked themselves the question, and the answer was this week’s installment of A Watch A Week: The Parmigiani Fleurier Ovale Pantographe. The idea behind the watch is both very simple and very complicated. Any watch that isn’t perfectly round, has to find some way to cope with the fact that the hands are a fixed length, and that they will, depending on where they are on the dial, feel either too short or too long for their own good. There are ways to get around this, most of which involve varying the length of the indexes or stamped numerals – one of the most impressive examples of this approach is the Cartier Crash, where the numerals, despite the fact that they are heavily distorted, have bases which are actually more or less exactly 30º apart, so that reading the time is straightforward.
The Ovale Pantographe gets its name from a drafting tool which is used to transfer a large drawing to a smaller surface, or vice versa; the pantograph has a telescoping arm which automatically reduces the size of a shape.
The Pantographe goes at the problem from an unexpected direction. The numerals and markers are more or less exactly the same length and width as you go around the enamel dial, however, the hands actually change length as they rotate.
This is straightforward enough, but there are some significant challenges involved. The first is a materials question – the hands have to be made of quite light, low inertia material in order for them to telescope smoothly. The solution Parmigiani came up with was to use blued aluminum – something I can’t recall having seen anywhere else in watchmaking, offhand. I don’t think aluminum can be thermally blued (as is the case with heat-blued titanium or steel) so the bluing is likely some chemical or anodizing process but the effect is very pretty and very close to the cornflower blue you’d get with steel (or titanium, for that matter).
A Deceptively Difficult Complication
The more serious problem, however, is that the hands need to do two things. As they telescope, they also need to maintain the same length proportions – otherwise it would be too difficult to distinguish the hour and the minute hands. The Ovale Pantographe achieves this through the use of a set of cams that control the length of the hands continuously as they rotate and at no point in the excursion of the hands around the dial does it become difficult to tell one hand from the other. The hands in addition to staying in proportion to each other, also maintain the same relationship to the markers and numerals on the dial, so that the tip of the hour hand (for instance) is the same distance from the 3 as it is from the 12.
This is an extremely neat trick and there is no real parallel to it from any other brand in modern watchmaking. There is one in historical watchmaking, however – the Ovale Pantographe was inspired by a very exciting (if you are a fan of obscure but ingenious antique horology) English pocket watch which if I recall correctly is currently in the collection of the Horological Museum in Neuchâtel.
The Ovale Pantographe is an exotic watch. Unlike so many so-called avanto-garde or exotic watches, however, it is a beautifully integrated design with a beautifully integrated complication which integrates beautifully with the history of watchmaking. It is a highly specific piece certainly but if you are looking deep into your soul and finding that you have had just about as much met-too watchmaking as you can stand this is a watch that will delight the mind, memory and senses for many years.
Incidentally, the movement is nothing to sneeze at either, to put it mildly. The caliber PF111 is hand-wound with an eight-day power reserve and the calmly aristocratic configuration of the plates and bridges is a reminder that when Parmigiani Fleurier first launched it was seriously spoken of as a real competitor with Patek Phillipe.
You can spend an awful lot of money nowadays whose primary purpose is not to showcase interesting watchmaking, but rather to show off on Instagram. This is not one of those watches. If you are at a point in your career as a collector where no matter the amount of gold in your purse, you are finding hype watches too expensive, too horologically boring, and above all, too juvenile, this is the watch for you.
Case, 45mm x 37.6mm x 12mm; water resistance 30m. Dial, white lacquer finish; “Pantograph” hands. Movement, caliber PF111, hand-wound, 8-day power reserve running in 28 jewels at 21,600 vph. Strap by Hermès in indigo blue alligator. To see it in action check out Tim Mosso’s video review right here.