The Christiaan Van Der Klaauw Ariadne

Ariadne is a mythical princess who was said to be the daughter of King Minos of Crete, and myth tells us that it was she who helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur in his labyrinth. Theseus being something of what gentlemen used to call a cad, abandoned her on the island of Naxos but she would later become the bride of Dionysus, the god of wine whose priestesses, the Maenads, were legendary for their fits of ecstatic delirium; Dionysus, it is said, threw her jeweled crown into the sky where it became the constellation, Corona Borealis. An age and more later, a Dutch-born horologist named Christiaan van der Klaauw would take the maiden’s name for a watch he created as part of a range of timepieces which made him famous and which were expressions of his fascination with astronomy, and with astronomical complications.

Christiaan van der Klaauw was born in Leiden in 1944, and in 1974, after attending the Leiden Instrument Maker’s School, he established his own brand, where he would begin exploring the world of complicated watchmaking in general, and astronomical complications in particular. He was active as a member of the AHCI from 1989 to 2014, and in that time he produced some of the most interesting astronomical complications of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Probably his best known is the 1999 “Planetarium” watch, which shows the orbits of Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (the visible planets) around the Sun, and which remains the smallest mechanical planetarium in the world, and he also developed a spherical moonphase display with a precision of one day in 11,000 years.

The Ariadne was originally launched in the late 1990s and it’s mechanically one of the less complex Christiaan van der Klaauw timepieces. The Ariadne is a complete calendar with pointer date, moonphase display, day of the week and month, and uses the ETA/Valjoux 7751, which was launched by ETA in 1986 and which is based on the ETA/Valjoux 7750. The 7750 is a cam operated automatic chronograph developed partly in response to the introduction of the first self winding chronograph movements, the El Primero, the Caliber 11, and the Seiko 6139, all within a few months of each other in 1969 and it was designed from the ground up to be a tough, reliable, easy-to-service movement, and its chief constructor, Edmond Capt, was just 24 when the 7750 was launched.

It is little discussed today in enthusiast circles but it was and is one of the most important automatic chronograph movements ever designed and it made the continued production of self winding chronographs possible right through the Quartz Crisis and down into the present day. It has been used by brands too numerous to count and while it has generally been found in sports chronographs, it has also been used in some very high end watches as a base caliber, including the IWC Da Vinci Grande Complication – a chronograph minute repeater with perpetual calendar. It’s safe to say that without the ETA 7750, modern watchmaking history would look very different; the El Primero, Seiko 6139, and Caliber 11 all went out of production at various times in their history and if you wanted a solid, dependable automatic chronograph caliber, in those days the 7750 was the only game in town.

As seen in the Ariadne, the 7750 shows several immediately recognizable features; the fine regulator is unmistakeable, as is the wire click spring – not a fine watchmaking solution, but a practical one and an indicator of the philosophy behind the 7751 and its predecessor, the 7750, which was to create a movement that was economical to produce at scale. The tilting pinion and cam design is less expensive to produce than a lateral clutch and column wheel, although nowadays, what are essentially column wheel versions of the 7750 can easily be found, but the fact that the 7750 and variants can be used in really high end complications speaks to the identity of the caliber as a “tracteur” as they say in the industry – a “tractor” that can pull a lot of weight, including the added load of additional complications, such as those which were added to the 7751.

The design and execution both front and back, make this a surprisingly romantic watch. It is a kind of watchmaking which despite the fact that the Ariadne was originally designed to make complicated watchmaking accessible, and whose movement was designed to allow the pleasures of complicated watchmaking to be enjoyed by enthusiasts who were not necessarily plutocrats, is rather rare these days; the Ariadne is both a beautiful watch in its own right, and for those of us who remember the collector’s landscape of two or three decades past, an exercise in nostalgia as well.

The Kristiaan van der Klaauw CVDK Ariadne:case, stainless steel, 40mm, automatic chronograph complete calendar with day of the week, month, pointer date, and moonphase indication. Price, $8500 from The 1916 Company; enquire for availability.