3 beauty
Complicated much?
The watch that cost as much as a small country’s GDP
By Wessel Stoltz
When you and I – plebeians in other words – wake
up in the morning, we generally think about how
many spoons of coffee we’ll add to our morning
brew to, firstly, wake up and secondly, make it
through to lunchtime.
When rich, and I mean absurdly rich, eccentric
bankers of a bygone era woke up, they thought
of making the most complicated watch ever conceived. Apparently.
When Mr. Graves found out that a certain automotive engineer, James Packard, was tinkering away at
night to build the most complicated watch ever, he
saw it as a challenge worthy of his multimillionaire
status.
In watch-jargon a “complication” is a horological
feature on a watch tasked with something other
than just telling time (who, after all, keeps a watch
to tell time?). And Packard’s watch had an impressive ten complications – no mean feat as this was
circa 1925...
The Henry Graves Supercomplication by Patek Phillipe
Skip forward eight years, and the folk from Patek
Philippe were finally ready to hand over the
masterpiece to their patron. The Henry Graves
Supercomplication boasts an inimitable 24 complications and is still heralded as the most complicated watch ever designed and built without
computer-aided technology.
Last year the watch popped up at an auction in
Switzerland where horologists and watch lovers
descended on Geneva to, at the very least, catch
Henry Graves Jr. spent his life accumulating a
a glimpse of the watch that eventually sold for a
rather large fortune through clever banking and
cool £13.4 million (make that £15.1 million when
shrewd investments in the railway. But perhaps In an effort to out-watch Packard, Graves secret- you include the auction house costs...).
it is his obsession with horology and him sub- ly approached watch doyens Patek Philippe and
sequently lending his name to the Holy Grail of tasked them with building him the most complicat- That’s roughly half the GDP of a country called
ed watch ever.
watches that gave him his lasting legacy.
Tuvalu...
THE 24 COMPLICATIONS
The hours, minutes and seconds of sidereal time (3)
The time of sunset and sunrise (2)
The equation of time
Perpetual calendar
The days of the month
The days of the week
The months
The stars chart
The age and phases of the moon
The Chronograph
Split seconds
The 30-minute recorder
The 12-hour recorder
The “Grande sonnerie” (Westminster chimes) with carillon
The “Petite sonnerie” with carillon
The minute-repeater
The alarm
The going train up-down indication
The striking train up/down indication
The twin barrel differential winding
The three-way setting system
the
WEATHER
STAND UP AND BE
COUNTED
THERE WILL BE
A RAIN DANCE
FRIDAY NIGHT...
WEATHER
PERMITTING.
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