The F. P. Journe Vagabondage II
A rare jumping time display in an even rarer watch.
When you think of F. P. Journe, you probably think of a watch with a round case and which houses, very probably, some sort of complication – I can’t hear the name without thinking of the Chronomètre à Résonance, which is also the watch most likely to make me have to look up the accents … again. You might think of something else, of course – the Tourbillon Souveraine, or, if your tastes incline more towards horological purism, the Chronomètre Optimum. However, Journe has of course created several watches that don’t feature a round case or an idiosyncratic take on a particular complication, and squarely in that category are the tortue shaped Vagabondage watches, which were the first non-round wristwatches Journe had ever created. One of these – Vagabondage II – is the subject of this edition of A Watch A Week.
The Vagabondage watches have appeared in AWAW before although it’s been a minute – the last time was back in January when we covered the Vagabondage III. Journe has made three versions of the Vagabondage watches, with the first – with a wandering hours complication and a large, centrally placed balance – released in 2005. Vagabondage II has a jumping hours display, along with a full jumping minutes indication. Finally, Vagabondage III has a jumping hours indication and a jumping seconds indication, which is a pretty neat trick – there’s a conventional minute hand but you can watch the seconds flick by in the double seconds window at 6:00; I think Vagabondage III is the only wristwatch ever made with a full jumping seconds display. Our friends over at Revolution sat down with F. P. Journe for a full history of all the Vagabondage models in 2017 and of course, you can’t ask for a better source than the maker himself.
Why Is The Jumping Time Display Is So Rare?
Vagabondage II is one of a very small group of watches with a full jumping hours and minutes display – the A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk is one of them (a complete history of the Zeitwerk’s right here) and the Harry Winston Opus III is another (Opus III is probably the best known of Harry Winston’s Opus watches, partly thanks to its quite out there design and partly due to the fact that it took years after its release to actually get the very ambitious design to work).
There is a very good reason you don’t see a lot of full jumping time display watches around – they’re technically a tall order. At the top of the hour, when the hours disk and both the tens and ones digits of the minute indication have to jump, there is an instantaneous load on the movement which can upset precision – think about it, an ordinary watch has just the three hands to move around the dial, and their mass and therefore inertia is negligible in comparison to the three disks.
The load required to switch the disks is not only greater than that necessary to move a set of watch hands, it is also irregular, with the switching of the single ones disk for the minutes requiring a lot less energy than switching all three disks at once. To make sure that the escapement and balance receive an even flow of power, Journe used the constant force device known as the remontoire d’egalité in Vagabondage II – a solution which A. Lange & Söhne also uses in the Zeitwerk.
The movement, caliber 1509, has most of the more kinetic elements on the dial side (naturally, since that’s where the jumping disks are located as well as the switching mechanisms) and from the back, the appearance is more austere – there is the balance, and some elements of the going train are visible including the balance and escape wheel, as well as the mainspring barrel and ratchet wheel.
The power reserve is on the low side for a modern watch; just 28 hours. However, if you look a little more closely at the stats for the balance provided by F. P. Journe (who is extremely thorough and precise about such data; I wish more manufacturers would follow suit) you’ll see that the balance amplitude is 250º at full wind, and still 250º at 24 hours, close to the end of the power reserve. This is partly due to the metallurgic properties of modern mainspring alloys, which tend to offer very even torque curves over most of their power reserve, but it’s also partly thanks to the use of the train remontoire. The movement is also relatively small for its complexity – just 29.3mm x 28.2mm.
Balance And Harmony In Design
Aesthetics are a matter of taste and in matters of taste, it’s said, De gustibus non disputandum est, but I think there is an argument to be made that of the three Vagabondage watches, Vagabondage II is the most successful aesthetically. Vagabondage III is fascinatingly kinetic, and Vagabondage I has primacy and history on its side as the first of the series but there is a symmetry and harmony to Vagabondage II which I think gives it the edge – let us say that is primus inter pares (first among equals) to keep the Latin going.
The smoked sapphire dial, black disks, and gold movement contrast beautifully with the central bridge for the disks and small seconds hand, which is almost perfectly vertically symmetrical except for the slightly lower left upper tip, which holds the jewel for the hours wheel and whose declivity allows room for the power reserve indicator.
When it was first released, in 2010, the Vagabondage was something of a revolution for the watch industry and for Journe (the Lange Zeitwerk had been released just a year earlier) and the watch has an air of somewhat austere, but darkly handsome technical beauty that I think is characteristic of F. P. Journe’s best work (in fact, of just about all of his work, come to think of it). You could if you were inclined to nitpicking, say that having to wind the watch every day is a drawback but when the interaction is between your fingers and a watch this beautiful and meaningful to the history of modern independent horology, I would be inclined to reply that daily winding is a feature, not a bug.