The MING 29.06 Peepshow Is Here To Tell You Creativity Is Alive And Well

It is an often repeated truism, and I know this because I have often repeated it, that to be genuinely creative with wristwatches at this particular point in the history of watchmaking, is next to impossible. New ideas are thin upon the ground at the best of times, and at this particular moment the zeitgeist seems to overwhelmingly favor old wine in new bottles, or hell, even old wine in bottles with fauxtina labels. Despite this, MING continues to present ideas which manage to both be completely outside the scope of just about any other brand, but completely on-brand for MING, and the 29.06 Peepshow is the latest demonstration that the well of inspiration at MING appears to be bottomless.

The above picture doesn’t show three different watches; these are three views of the same watch. The Peepshow is a watch featuring all the design cues we have learned to associate with a MING watch, including the “flying blade” lugs and the use of unusual optical effects. By the numbers, this is a 40mm x 11.8mm titanium watch with sapphire crystals front and back (a box crystal on the front) which is powered by a custom execution of a Schwarz-Etienne microrotor caliber. The Peepshow also incorporates a recent MING innovation, which is the white emission MING Polar White Super-LumiNova. The real party trick, though, is the changing appearance of the watch – the dial gradually cycles from completely opaque to completely transparent as time passes, alternately revealing and concealing the multiphasic coating enhanced, deeply CNC-guilloché decorated dial below.

Here it is, in the hands of its creator, doing its thing.

The effect is achieved using two panes of polarized sapphire disks, which work the same way that polarized filters work in photography.

When I was a kid, I had an uncle who encouraged my interest in science and who used to send me odd little gifts from the old Edmund Scientific catalog, which was a sort of electronics/science/engineering hobbyist’s supply house that could send you everything from mechanical analog computer kits, to microscopes, to giant Fresnel lenses (excellent for setting things on fire on long summer afternoons) to helium-neon lasers, believe it or not. I later found out that he had been before retirement, a career CIA officer who had spent some time in Berlin during the Cold War, running agent networks.

One fine day, a packaged arrived in the mail – a gift from the catalog he thought I’d enjoy. It turned out to be a couple of polarizing filters and I was fascinated by the fact that you could rotate them to change the amount of light that the two filters allowed through – almost total transparency at one extreme and near total opacity at the other. I often felt as if there was an idea for a practical application kind of scratching at the id-ego interface but it never really surfaced, but many, many years later it occurred to me that you could do something with watch design with the phenomenon. I never did anything with the idea, but MING did.

The Peepshow uses two disk with polarizing coating – one has the minute hand on it and the other, the hour hand, both filled with Super-LumiNova X1, green emission (blue-green, I suppose, which is the most luminous type of SLN; you can get other colors but you do take a little bit of a hit in luminosity the further you get away from the blue-green end of the spectrum, which makes sense since that is the most energetic wavelength. If we could see into the ultraviolet spectrum like some birds and insects can, what a game-changer that would be).

As the disks rotate, the allowed wavelengths change, which is what produces the pulsating alternation between opacity and transparency. Polarizing coatings usually consist of some organic polymer, stretched out to align the molecules so that they act as effective gates, blocking some wave orientations and allowing some others.

The actual physical dial is CNC-engraved with a double spiral pattern and is coated with the same “multiphasic” coating MING introduced in the 57.04 monopusher chronograph. This coating acts as a selective diffraction filter for returning various colors, depending on the angle at which the dial is viewed. So you really have multiple levels on which the Peepshow can change its character:

• Cyclical variations in transparency
• Variations in visibility of the luminous markers and hands depending on the ambient lighting
• Variations in the visible color spectrum of the dial itself, depending on ambient lighting and angle of incidence

Is cool, no? Not being bound by the burden of “tradition” MING has always been more free to experiment since launching in 2017 and a shockingly high percentage of the watches – adjusting expectations for personal tastes, of course – feel like must-haves.

The MING 29.06 Peep Show: case, 40mm x 11.8mm, grade 5 titanium with flying blade lugs, MING Polar White lume with polarized filter sapphire disks carrying the hands which are filled with Super-LumiNova X1, blue-green emission. 50M water resistant; 22mm lug width (this would be cool on the MING Polymesh strap). Movement, Schwartz-Etienne for MING caliber ASE 200.M1, running in 29 jewels, 30mm x 5.6mm, 86 hour power reserve, adjusted to five positions. Strap, Perlon textured calfskin with Alacantra lining by Jean Rousseau, with curved quick release spring bars and “flying blade” tuck buckle (no keeper). 2 year warranty. Limited production of 50 watches, price CHF 22,000, and available at MING and through MING AD’s. Get ’em while they’re hot.