Steel, Wheels, And Ovals: A Stainless Steel Audemars Piguet Millenary Star Wheel

Audemars Piguet’s Millenary Collection, which was launched in 1995 and which was phased out – slowly but surely – by 2018 – was as oval watches will tend to be, a niche collection full of niche models, but I was sorry to see them go, and while they flourished, the Millenary cases housed some of AP’s most interesting complications, and gave AP an opportunity to explore different kinds of dial compositions as well as different compositional relationships of the movement to the dial. One of the finest examples of a Millenary watch was the Millenary Minute Repeater, which debuted as a very limited edition of 8 pieces in 2010 (and which had a very-frisky-for-2010 price tag of CHF 400,000) in a titanium case, and moreover with a double balance spring, AP’s own direct impulse escapement (also, and perhaps most famously, seen in the Jules Audemars ChronAP). Another was the rare and exotic Tradition Of Excellence Cabinet Piece No. 5, a deadbeat seconds perpetual calendar, also with double balance springs, also with the AP escapement, made in a limited edition of 20 pieces, in platinum, in 2007.

As you can see, there was a time and not that long ago either, when the Millenary collection contained some of the most technically advanced and aesthetically interesting AP watches ever to come down the pike, albeit this was at the same time that the drive to make increasingly more technically complex flagship talking pieces was probably at its strongest in a quarter century; those days are gone. Some of us miss them, for all that the era produced some obviously ferociously expensive, very small production watches more useful perhaps as talking points than as timepieces that advanced the cause of fundamental improvements in mechanical horology – both the AP escapement and the Millenary Collection overall are no more – but it was also the last time that the industry was not asking itself “Why?” but instead was asking, “Why not?”

The Millenary Star Wheel is one example of that spirit of invention and willingness to experiment both technically and aesthetically. This particular model (25898ST.OO.D020VE.01) was made in 2000 as part of AP’s 125th anniversary celebrations and that year, AP could proudly boast of a turnover in 1999 “approaching 140 million CHF” according to the FHH coverage at the time. (According to the Q4 Morgan Stanley report for the Swiss watch industry, AP’s turnover for 2024 was CHF 2.38 billion). The star wheel complication was introduced by AP in 1995 and unlike the AP escapement and the entire Millenary collection, the star wheel complication’s still present in AP’s current catalog, in the Code 11.59 collection. 

The star wheel complication gets its name from the eight pointed star-shaped wheels on which the hour numerals are printed. The complication is straightforward – the ring carrying the three transparent sapphire hour disks rotates clockwise, with each numeral passing through a sector marked off with the minutes. As the ring carrying the disks rotates, the disks jump from one hour to the next as the disk passes out of the minute sector, so that the correct hour is always displayed, with the hour disks held in place by jumper springs bearing on the star wheel gear teeth. In the round versions of the Star Wheel (one of which was featured in the first ever installment of A Watch A Week) the 120º minute sector is at the top of the dial but for the Millenary Star Wheel, the sector is to the right.

The star wheel complication is generally thought of as a relatively modern complication (although if you are a stickler for precision in horological terminology, it is not, strictly speaking, a complication as it does not display any additional information other than the time; the same can be said, if you are looking for a cocktail party conversation starter, of the tourbillon and I suppose the deadbeat seconds too). The star wheel was however invented quite a long time ago – in or around 1655, by three Italian clockmakers named Matteo, Pietro, and Giuseppe Campani, who invented it for Pope Alexander VII; the Pope wished to be able to tell the time at night without having to activate, or wait for, the chimes of a clock and the minute sectors of the early wandering hours clocks were illuminated from behind by a candle inside the case.  If you ever happen to visit URWERK (today’s best known user of and innovator in the wandering hours complication) you will see in their Geneva offices a 17th wandering hours clock.

It is I have always felt a little bit of a missed opportunity that AP did not use Super-LumiNova for the minute sector, and today, if they made a new version of this watch, I wonder whether or not they might not choose to do so. In 2000, not using SLN on the minute sector is maybe a less difficult decision to understand. The industry as a whole had begun to shift away from tritium only a couple of years earlier; SLN was still a relatively new material and it was far from obvious that using it as a permanent design feature for aesthetic purposes was a good idea.

The Millenary Star Wheel is conventional, especially conventional for its time, in most other respects. At 41mm across its longest axis, it’s not an especially large watch and at just 8.9mm thick it’s fairly thin as well (for comparison, the current version of the Royal Oak Jumbo is 39mm x 8.1mm). Construction of the Millenary Star Wheel is modular, with the the star wheel module sitting on top of a Jaeger-LeCoultre 889. The caseback is solid, but you won’t miss seeing the movement since most of the mechanical fascination of the watch is on the dial side anyway.

The Millenary Minute Repeater, Millenary Cabinet Piece No. 5, and for that matter, the Millenary x Maserati (yes, it exists) are all wonderful examples of what you can do with complications if you are not trying to solve the basic and well-worn compositional problem of fitting complications into a round dial. The oval shape, for all that it might have put some people (okay, possibly many people) off, gave AP a chance to experiment with designs that no other case shape could have offered.

It’s been a quarter century since this watch was released, along with several other 125th Anniversary AP watches that have also largely sunk silently below the surface and been, justly or unjustly, forgotten. I still think this is one of the better things AP has produced in the last thirty decades. It’s brash and unusual, sure, but it also achieves a dynamic compositional balance that you cannot get from a round or square case, and it shows AP in its role as the enfant terrible of watch design, much better at this point than the Royal Oak and its derivatives. The Royal Oak has long since passed from being a revolution in design to being a trope, mined for every last drop of juice not just by AP but also by all of its imitators across a number of brands too numerous to mention. With the Millenary Star Wheel, on the other hand, you get something that still feels as original and risky as it did a quarter century ago – even more so, maybe, now than then.

See It Here