For men who don’t need GPS

to know where they stand.

Anzeige Saxon One 6420-04 Wristwatch Annual 05_2015 SWOP2006_Coated3v2 sf1.indd 1 13.05.15 15:45

S:162.3 mm

S:243.3 mm

T:175 mm

T:256 mm

B:210 mm

B:297 mm

16wristwatch annual 20The Catalog of Producers, Prices, Models, and Specifications

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Masters and Mavericks

Jean-Claude Biver, that indomitable booster of high-end watchmaking, for-mer CEO of Hublot, and now at TAG Heuer, never tires of explaining that

his love of fine watches originated in his boyish fascination with steam engines. The extraordinarily precise ballet of the pistons,

levers, and cams, the strange motion of the eccentric, the multidimensional world of gears and pivots all conspiring to channel raw power into orderly motion does have a hypnotic effect on many people, in the same way the workings of the universe or a superb poem can transfix the mind.

MACHINES AND TIMEMiki Eleta and Marc Jenni have shortened the path between majestic contraptions and the watch. Eleta, born in 1950 in Višegrad (Bosnia & Herzegovina) but now at home in Switzerland, is a kinetic artist who special-izes in extraordinary large clocks. The Time Burner represents his first foray into wrist-watches while also serving as a nostalgic tribute to his childhood. While the visuals of the Timeburner are inspired in general by Eleta’s love for mechanics, forces, and motion, the specific elements originate in recreating the soul—not the actual features—of a 1950 BMW motorcycle.

Eleta’s sense of design together with Jen-ni’s watchmaking expertise is simply irre-sistible for fans of big and small mechanics alike: Like an engine converting the chemi-cal energy of gas into the mechanical energy

London Jewelers - East Hampton & South Hampton, NY l Levinson Jewelers - Fort Lauderdale, FL l Westime - Beverly Hills & West Hollywood, CA l E.D. Marshall Jewelers - Scottsdale, AZ l Piccione’s - Lyndhurst, OH l Topper Fine Jewelers - Burlingame, CA l Peyrelongue - Mexico City l Berger - Santa Fe, Mexico City l Moray’s - Miami, FL l John Varvatos Boutiques - West Hollywood, Costa Mesa, Malibu, CA - Bowery, Soho, East Hampton, NY - Las Vegas, NV - Miami Beach, Bal Harbour, FLHouston, TX - London, UK l Diamonds International - St. Thomas, St. Maarten, St. Lucia, St. Kitts, Aruba, Barbados, Nassau, Grand Cayman, Jamaica, Belize, Cozumel, Cabo San Lucas, Puerta Vallarta & Honduras.

PRECISION INSTRUMENTS FOR TIMEKEEPING

CHRONOLUNAR DLCwww.ernstbenz.com

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StorytellersMarton Radkai

Miki Eleta and his old BMW (above) that inspired the Time Burner (left), a collaboration with watchmaker Marc Jenni.

Some of the finest spices grow in the wild. And some of the most unusual watches are created by amateurs, genius hermits, or seasoned veterans slipping outside their traditional box. And their products, for lack of a better word, often show that there is no end to creativity.

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Masters and Mavericks

of motion, this cool watch transforms spark plug energy (winding the crown) into motion along a nonlinear time scale. The piston’s trajectory up and down the cylinder indi-cates the minutes on two scales: 0 to 30 minutes one way, and 30 to 60 the other. The piston ring is the reference point.

In some ways, Louis Moinet did the same when it released its very high-end Derrick Tourbillon a few years back (limited edition). The dial features, rather incongruously, an oil pump and a derrick (as an aside, Ulysse Nardin came up with a similar image recently). The clash of such large, indus-trial mechanics on a delicate watch dial in a case of precious metal was both blatant yet attractive in a Beauty and the Beast sort of way. In fact, what the creators at Moinet had done was build a classic automaton, a steampunk-inspired jacquemart perfectly in tune with watchmaking traditions. In 2015, they continued down the path of energy exploration with the Derrick Gaz, which, as the name suggests, shows a gas-drill-ing scene with an endless screw exploring the earth under a derrick, guiding the gas through piping, which is the bridge holding the tourbillon in place, to a valve that turns when the watch is wound. A manometer dis-

plays the power reserve, and finally, at the right side of the dial stands the gas tank of stainless steel.

ASCETO-PUNKWhile the watches above celebrate their kinship with mechanics in general, other watches tell a story about themselves and their native industry. The Angelus U10 Tour-billon Lumière is just such a timepiece. It boasts complications, but without visible complexity. Instead, it imposes order on the mechanics so as to exhibit them better.

Angelus? The name will be familiar to buffs of classic wristwatches, because it was one of those grand old brands scuttled by the quartz crisis and the collapse of the dollar in the 1970s. Its last hurrah was a costly minute repeater built in partnership with Dubois Dépraz, now a much coveted collector’s item.

The money behind the Angelus revival appears to come from movement maker La Joux-Perret and Arnold & Son, whose designer Sebastien Chaulmontet authored the Lumière. This good name, meaning light, is what the watch strives for. Its most visible element is a perfect, 16.25 mm tour-billon spinning in a separate window where

it can be seen from all sides, including lat-erally. The watch itself runs on an in-house manually wound movement with a dignified 18,000 vph rhythm and a double spring bar-rel delivering about ninety hours of power reserve. It features deadbeat seconds—a nod to the quartz watches that spelled the end of the original Angelus or to an Arnold specialty?—and a linear power reserve indi-cator in the side of the case. This new Ange-lus was inspired by travel alarm clocks the brand made in its heyday, and indeed, the rectangular format, the line markers, the slightly forced elements of modernism do recall the 1970s.

MANIACAL MECHANICSMany watchmakers, especially the passion-ate ones without shareholders, have the liberty to tread a fine line between engi-neering art and artistic engineering. They do not need to represent anything as such; the beauty of the mechanics suffices on its own, and the practical use comes as a by-product. So here is a hypothetical: What if M. C. Escher had been a watchmaker? The creator of “impossible realities,” who came from an engineering family and was fond of mathematics, has a horological twin in Dan-

Gas exploration on the dial of the Louis Moinet Derrick Gaz. Seventies codes, timeless machine: the Angelus U10 Tourbillon Lumière.

The Luminox P-38 Lightning™ Series is part of the Collection.

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iel Nebel, a solo watchmaker from northern Switzerland, hence his watches named Nord Zeitmaschinen, meaning north time machines.

Nebel, a certified engineer, has achieved a modicum of success, but his output is limited by necessity. He has a day job to finance his passion for watchmaking. He is also a bit of a recluse, but what can one expect from a watchmaker who creates very complex systems (not just complications) and does everything by himself, except pro-ducing the base movement, the sapphire crystal, and the straps. Apparently, he even manufactured the CNC machines he works with.

The Zeitmaschine collections do not indi-cate time in a circular, linear, or retrograde manner. The bold minute hands travel along arcs, which in turn creates very special engi-neering challenges. His earlier watch, the Variocurve, for instance, shows the minutes on two parallel arcs stretching over the dial. The long skeletonized hand is controlled by two meshed gearwheels that share the task of driving the hand, alternately raising or lowering it. But here is the punch line: As the hand changes levels at the dial’s edge, it describes a very tight angle and travels a shorter distance. So the 10-20 and 40-50 segments were put on discs that move

along with the minute hand. This ingenious mechanism creates an outstanding visual ballet. As for the hours, they emerge dis-creetly on another wheel that peers from beneath the minute plate at about 7 o’clock on a normal watch. Same approach for the date, at 5 o’clock.

The latest Nebel production is called the Quickindicator. The construction appears simpler at first glance. The hour disc has moved up to 9 o’clock, the date to 3 o’clock. The minute arcs are in fact circles that spiral psychedelically into one another, so they do not require any assistance from discs in the corner. The minute hand travels on a swirl-ing path that is dizzying to watch when sped up. It is a touch maniacal, but then again, genuine creativity sometimes resides on the border with madness. “If possible, you should use time in a sensible way,” Nebel wrote me. “But since that is relative and not always possible, then you should just take time as it comes.” In this case, in crazy circles . . .

DREAMS COME TRUEArt often results when a watchmaker or designer decides to escape from the con-straints of his or her trade without losing touch with the craft, as people like Jean-Marc Wiederrecht prove (see page 34).

Long a part of Wristwatch Annual’s A-to-Z section, MB&F continues to fascinate the watch world with mind-boggling creations by top-drawer watchmakers. The energy behind them is Max Büsser, a man with an unfaltering sense of style and the courage to take a few risks. His M.A.D. Gallery in the rue Verdaine in Geneva, with a subsidiary in Taiwan, contains kinetic or static sculp-tures oftentimes unrelated or only indirectly related to timekeeping: light installations by Frank Buchwald, hair-raising motorcycles by Chicara Nagata, or the “retro-futuristic robots” by Bruno Lefèvre-Brauer, known as +Brauer, whose exhibition in June 2015 was titled “Viva la Robolución!”

Büsser, of course, is a fan of sci-fi, so the two table clocks he presented at Baselworld in 2014 and 2015 are no real surprise. They were designed in-house and executed by L’Epée 1839, a specialist clockmaker in Delémont, Switzerland. The first is the Starfleet Machine, an intergalactic space-craft with a clock under the dome presum-ably housing the bridge for Captain Kirk or some other hero. Beneath it, two red-tipped cannons move about for a double retrograde seconds display. Another dome with strange markings turns out to be the power reserve: forty days, in fact—enough for some space travel.

Horological fantasy turns into an intergalactic table clock, by MB&F.

Time marches to a different tune on Daniel Nebel’s Variocurve.

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