The Ulysse Nardin Freak Blue Cruiser

The Ulysse Nardin Freak has been around, in one form or another, since 2001 and despite the name, it has proven to be a versatile platform for innovation and design. However, the same basic principle has been behind every Freak since the very first. The Freak is a watch in which the entire movement rotates once per hour and functions as the minute hand of the watch – the movement is propelled by the very large mainspring, which takes up the entire diameter of the case. The gears of the movement are arranged along its long axis, with the first gear, at the tip, driven against gear teeth under the inner side of the bezel. On the opposite end of the movement are the regulating components, including the escape wheels and the balance.

One of the particular characteristics of the Freak is that there is no crown – the architecture of the movement and mainspring make it impossible to use one, and a standard crown would be too small to provide adequate leverage for winding and setting. Instead, the watch is wound from a bezel mounted on the back of the watch. Setting the time is done from a matching bezel on the front, and, with the Freak Blue Cruiser, there is also an additional feature, which is a locking lever that prevents the bezel from being moved accidentally.

The Blue Cruiser also features an updated version of the Dual Direct escapement that premiered on the original 2001 Freak. The Dual Direct escapement uses two escape wheels whose gear teeth mesh with each other, and is a variation on a much older invention – the so-called “natural” escapement (echappement naturel) which Breguet invented in 1789. The natural escapement has two escape wheels geared to each other – one of them is driven by the other – and the idea was to create an escapement that required no lubrication (like the chronometer detent escapement) but which also provided impulse in both directions of the balance wheel’s rotation, and which was self-starting (like the lever escapement). Breguet only made about 20 watches with this escapement – even with the best machining of the time, the tolerances required to make the escapement work consistently proved impossible to achieve.

The idea was too good to die entirely, though, and a number of other watchmakers have experimented with it since then, one of whom was George Daniels. Ulysse Nardin’s versions rely on a material that was not available to Breguet but which he would certainly have been fascinated by: silicon. Although a great many newer watch enthusiasts are unaware of the early history of silicon components, the first experiments with the material in watchmaking were made by a consortium consisting of Rolex, Swatch Group, Patek Philippe, and Ulysse Nardin, with technical support from CSEM (Centre Suisse d’Electronique et Microtechnique). CSEM is not very well known outside the industry it serves but it’s a fairly large company, with over 500 employees and over 200 patents to its credit since its founding in 1984, and its manufacturing capabilities were essential to the evolution of the first generation of silicon watch components. By the time the Blue Cruiser came along, Ulysse Nardin was on the second version of its Dual Direct escapement, now dubbed the Dual Ulysse, which had better integration between the two escape wheels than the first version, and which offered much more reliable operation.

On top of all the other technical features, the Freak is also a kind of tourbillon. As far as I know, it was not necessarily the intention of Ulysse Nardin’s then-technical director, Dr. Ludwig Oechslin, to improve on the advantages of the tourbillon as a regulating device per se, but nonetheless, the Freak is a watch with a rotating platform carrying the regulating organs, just like a conventional tourbillon, and so it fits the broader definition.

The original idea for the Freak came from none other than Carole Forestier, one of the best known technical minds in the industry – she was responsible for a whole host of innovative complications at Cartier, for instance, in the mid-2000s (which is where I was first exposed to her and her work). Forestier’s design from 1997, developed just after she graduated from watchmaking school, won the Prix Abraham-Louis Breguet, and the patent was acquired by Ulysse Nardin and subsequently became the Freak.

Now, the Freak is certainly a fascinating watch from a technical standpoint, but it’s hard to convey the emotional impact it had when it was first released. The debut of the Freak coincided with a huge boom in interest in fine watchmaking in particular, and mechanical horology in general, powered by the rise of the first generation of enthusiast discussion forums on the Web, and not only was there enormous interest in the Freak, there was also a newfound appetite for the kind of out-there, even extreme, watch design that the Freak represented. It’s one of the most important watch designs of the last fifty or so years, inasmuch as it woke up the Swiss watch industry – which historically, is incredibly risk averse and conservative – to the fact that mechanically innovative watchmaking coupled with unconventional design could really put a company on the map in a big way.

That legacy is still with us today. If you’ve ever looked at a watch that’s undeniably extroverted, unusually complicated, and visually transgressive, chances are very good that you are looking at something which in some way was influenced by the debut of the Freak two decades ago. For a collector interested in owning and experiencing real milestones, it doesn’t get any better than the Freak.

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