The Moritz Grossmann Atum Enamel

Moritz Grossmann is named for one of the four founding fathers of watchmaking in Glashütte, who, in the mid-1840s, got the then-King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, to underwrite a plan to revive the economic fortunes of Glashütte by establishing a watchmaking industry (the other three watchmakers were Ferdinand Adolph Lange, Julius Assmann, and Adolf Schneider). Grossmann’s watches were as is typical of Glashütte pocket watches of the era, of extremely high quality technically and were designed to offer durability and accuracy, at a time when these goals were on the same continuum as high quality in craftsmanship. A typical example is Grossmann’s own pocket watch, no. 2966, which was sold at Christie’s in 2018 and which featured among other things, an enamel dial with very fine, elongated Roman numerals, needle-fine hands, and a movement constructed around a 3/4 plate, with an elaborately engraved balance cock and a screw-type micrometric regulator for fine adjustment of rate.

These features can also be found in a quite remarkable watch from Moritz Grossmann, the watch brand, which was founded by Christine Hütter in Glashütte and which released its first model in 2010. The Atum Enamel which we have today, was released in 2017 as a 25 piece limited edition and today, there is a similar model in the catalog – the Benu Enamel Roman Vintage, although that model, which is an 8 piece limited edition, has a black enamel dial with a red XII.

Atum was the supreme god of the Egyptian pantheon, by the way, a god born of the primordial waters, so you might say Grossmann set the bar for excellence pretty high with the name, and the expectations thereof.

You could start with either side of the Atum Enamel and find lots to talk about but let us be conventional and start with the dial side. The fired enamel dial was used extensively in pocket watches, especially in the 19th century, in virtually every center of watchmaking and by the late 19th century American watch factories were producing them at scale. Today however they have become a specialist project. Although enamel dials can craze or crack if a watch is mishandled, they have one major advantage: they are completely chemically stable, as they are essentially a form of fused glass, and treated with reasonable care, will last indefinitely with no signs of aging at all. The sunken subdial is fired as a separate piece, with the elongated Roman numerals reflecting the design of the original Grossmann pocket watch no. 2966.

You occasionally hear objections from folks who are perhaps unfamiliar with centuries long watchmaking conventions, about the fact that the subdial cuts off the VI on the dial (and partially cuts off the V and the VII). This is less a design flaw than it is simply a longstanding tradition which allows for a larger small seconds subdial and which gives the dial a sense of depth and there are literally millions of pocket watches produced over the last 250 years which have essentially the same layout.

The hands on any Moritz Grossmann watch are some of the most beautiful in the business. The Atum Enamel is a classic example. The hands are extremely fine and thin, shaped like an African assegai spear, and have a highly polished, mirror-finished central boss. Often, in watchmaking, when steel hands are heat tempered they are taken up to a cornflower blue; Moritz Grossmann uses a slightly lower temperature to temper its hands to a deep brownish-violet, which is seen much less often in vintage pocket watches. Steel takes on a deep blue color at 550ºF and transitions to a light blue at 590ºF; it reaches violet at 52oº and begins to transition to purple at 53oº so if you’re heat coloring steel, temperature control as well as even application of heat is essential. The tradition method involves placing the part in question on a copper plate and carefully bringing it to temperature over an alcohol lamp flame; drafts, obviously, are verboten.

The dial and hands are a lovely exercise in traditional watchmaking crafts; the 3/4 plate movement is likewise an uncompromising catalog of classic fine watchmaking, and Glashütte watchmaking, designs and techniques.

Unlike a Swiss full-bridge movement, which typically has a bridge for the crown wheel and ratchet wheel, a separate bridge for the center and third wheel, and individual cocks for fourth wheel and escape wheel, a 3/4 plate movement has one single bridge for all the going train wheels, with a separate cock for the escape wheel (a cock in watchmaking has a single point of attachment to the mainplate, while a bridge has two). Sometimes you’ll see a 3/4 plate movement described as a full plate movement – but don’t be that guy; a full plate movement has the entire going train including the escapement covered, with only the balance and balance spring visible and full plate watches are essentially nonexistent in modern watchmaking.

The 3/4 plate was less popular in Swiss watchmaking, but favored by American, English, and to some extent German watchmakers, who were less concerned with producing a slim caliber and who preferred the greater rigidity of the 3/4 plate. The only other disadvantage of a 3/4 plate is that it tends to make it more difficult to assemble the movement as you have to get all the train wheel pivots to fall into the upper jewel holes at the same time.

The 3/4 plate is decorated with vertical striping which has been very finely applied, with none of the coarseness or excessive removal of metal that characterizes automated and therefore cheaper production. Chatons are used to fix the clear sapphire jewels in place – a hardened steel pivot in a sapphire jewel runs with almost no friction and this can be reduced even further with the judicious use of lubricant. In Mortiz Grossmann’s day, movements would have been oiled with vegetable or whale oils, which oxidize rapidly; nowadays we have the advantages given by synthetic oils from producers like Moebius. Today, movement jewels are usually friction fit directly into the movement bridge; chatons are an anachronism but a very beautiful one which here gives a sense of connection to the traditions of Glashütte watchmaking.

The escape wheel is polished, with polished rounded spokes and the lever is beveled and mirror polished as well; the regulator is beveled and polished as is the regulator sweep index, and the outer terminal curve of the overcoil balance spring is held in place with a beautifully formed stud, in turn fixed in place with a blade spring fixed to the side of the balance cock, which has a screw for adjusting the tension of the spring a little more than halfway along its length. The micrometric screw regulator is an extreme rarity in modern watchmaking, seldom seen outside vintage pocket watches today. The contrasts with typical mass produced escapement components could not be more dramatic and of course, the balance cock is decorated with intricate and very tastefully designed engraving, as is the separate cock for the escape wheel.

You could go on – the beautifully polished teeth on the crown and rachet wheels, the overall tasteful restraint in finishing which is increasingly in contrast to the finishing found on some luxury watches which seems more about arbitrarily making as many sharp inner corners as possible rather than making movements in which finishing is the logical extension of good workshop practices, and so on. One additional point worth mentioning as it shows Moritz Grossmann’s attention to the client experience, is the hand-setting mechanism. To set the Atum, you pull the crown out, which then snaps back to the first position. Pulling out the crown engages the keyless works for setting the time. Once you have set the time, you press the button on the caseband at 4:00, which disengages the setting mechanism and restarts the balance. This ensures that there is no jumping of the minute hand out of the correct position when the watch restarts, which is a problem that can affect even some very expensive watches.

The Atum is a watch in which there is no element which doesn’t show the thought and care of the people who designed and created it. It eschews showiness of any kind and is a reminder that fineness in fine watchmaking is historically, and I think ideally, a matter of understanding what the fundamentals of traditional fine watchmaking really are, what their relationship is to excellence in materials and expertise in craft, and how a seamless relationship between aesthetics and mechanics arises naturally when those understandings are in place. In its refusal to pander to effects and its almost reactionary devotion to traditional watchmaking, the Atum is a rarity in modern watchmaking but also, in a way you would not expect from such a traditionally designed and conceived watch, a breath of fresh air.

See it here