Rock And Roller: The URWERK UR-111C Black LE
Time, in line.
I don’t know if a grand total of two articles necessarily constitutes a theme but we do have a little bit of a mini-theme this week – watches with unusual mechanical-digital time displays, which are also related to the category known as “driver’s watches.” The just-announced MB&F HM8 Mark 2 and its predecessors were created specifically to fit into the driver’s watch category and while the watch we’re looking at for this installment of A Watch A Week was not intended as a driver’s watch per se, the URWERK UR-111C Black is meant to be legible without turning your wrist. When it launched URWERK noted, “With the watch on your arm the indications are on the side of your wrist so that you can tell the time at a glance without having to turn your wrist. With your arm in its natural position when you walk, sit or drive, the time is always in your line of sight.”
The UR-111C was originally released in stainless steel in 2018 and was preceded by the UR-CC1 “King Cobra,” which launched in 2009 and which also had a linear time display.
The King Cobra was in turn inspired by the linear speedometer displays found in many vintage cars from the late 1950s and 1960s, and the unusual time display was, as we saw in our story on the MB&F HM8 Mark 2, preceded by a prototype created by Patek Philippe in 1958, also known as the Cobra. That watch had a distinguished parentage – the design was by Gilbert Albert, who was responsible for some of most stylish and unusual watches Patek, generally otherwise known for its conservative design language, had ever created and the roller display was by Louis Cottier, who gave us the first world time complication. Patek was granted a patent for the complication in 1959, but the watch never went into production for reasons which are today not entirely clear – it may not have worked particularly well (the roller system was built on top of the rectangular caliber 9-90, which may not have had enough juice in the mainspring to power it) or may have just been too darned out there for Patek in the 1950s … you have to wonder how the design would do if the company re-issued it today.
Automotive Inspiration
There were other speedometer-style watches in the 1970s – an era when slightly, or very, wacky watch designs were not only part of a larger revolution in design language, but also a way of setting mechanical watches apart from quartz – but URWERK is the company most identified, with good reason, for this in-line style.
The UR-111C is part of a group of so-called UR-Special Projects watches, which in general represent departures from URWERK’s more standard implementations of the wandering hours complication (a well known example from another company are the more classically styled Audemars Piguet Starwheel watches). The number of variations that URWERK has produced on this complication are quite incredible but the Special Projects watches provide a venue for experimentation outside business as usual – if you can call anything that URWERK does, “business as usual.”
The two questions that immediately come to mind when you see the UR-111C are, how do you read it and how does it work? Reading off the time is despite the complexity of the display, pretty intuitive. The hours are shown in a jumping hours conical roller on the left, with the linear retrograde display for the minutes taking center stage. On the right is a continuously rotating conical display for the minutes as well – technically redundant, but it does balance the hours display and makes the watch symmetrical. The seconds are visible in a window on top of the case, and there is a very unusual cyclops magnifier above the two satellites that carry the seconds numerals, which are in 5 second increments. The cyclops is not made of sapphire or conventional glass – instead, it’s formed from a bundle of optical glass fibers, which act as conduits for the images and which also produce the illusion of the numbers being on the same plane as the surface of the watch case.
The UR-111C does not have a conventional crown. Instead, you wind the watch via the knurled roller under the running seconds display. Setting the watch is done by pulling out a hinged lever on the right side of the watch case, which is pleasantly reminiscent of film rewind levers on film cameras.
Surprisingly enough, the UR-111C has a stop seconds function as well, which allows you to set the time precisely – to the second, more or less, as long as you wait for one of the seconds satellites to be centered in the magnifier.
URWERK watches in general are large, and are so for a reason – the satellite systems or, in this case, the elaborate linear roller system, require more space than a conventional watch movement and, certainly, the overt science-fiction vibe of their watches seems to ask for a more extroverted case size; the UR-111C is no exception.
While it’s true that you don’t need to turn your wrist to see the time, the curvature of the roller means that it’s not particularly hard to read the time with your wrist turned in the conventional checking-the-time position.
Who It’s For
The UR-111C is a watch that’s going to appeal – intentionally – to a fairly narrow audience but that the design is divisive merely speaks to how unusual and interesting it is. Naturally, if you are an URWERK enthusiast, you’re probably going to find this watch at least as appealing as anything else that URWERK has done and perhaps even more so as the complication is a bit of an outlier from the company’s usual production. Anyone who collects, or is interested in beginning to collect, watches with unusual systems for displaying the time is likely to find the UR-111C tempting, as will anyone who has a larger interest in the history and innovations of modern independent horology (especially from URWERK, which is an essential part of the modern independent watchmaking landscape).
The exclusivity of the UR-111C is attractive as well. Aside from the fact that you are very unlikely to run into another collector wearing a watch with a linear time display, the UR-111C Black is a rare watch – it was a limited edition of just 25 watches (and is long since sold out at URWERK). It’s true that nowadays, the pendulum is swinging away from larger watches as a return to more classically sized timepieces takes hold, but as we mentioned, URWERK’s watches are not large for the sake of being large – they are instead, the size they are, to offer a larger canvas for some of modern watchmaking’s most interesting horological art.
The URWERK UR-111C: case, 316L stainless steel and grade 5 titanium, black PVD coated; 41mm x 46mm x 15mm; water resistant to 30M. Sapphire crystals with antireflective coating. Displays, jumping hours, linear helical retrograde minutes and rotating minutes, digital rotating seconds. Movement, automatic with stop seconds, running at 28,800 vph in 37 jewels; anodized aluminum cylinder for the retrograde minutes. LIGA fabricated seconds wheels. Limited edition of 25 pieces, originally launched in 2019. For more, check out Tim Mosso’s video review at The 1916 Company Studios.