The arcane world of luxury watches is well known for regularly serving up "trends" that have only a passing attachment to reality. Well, 2016 has been no exception, prompting an unexpected vogue among ultra high-end manufacturers for timepieces cased not in steel, or gold, but in solid sapphire.
This kind of trend often elicits a certain degree of eye-rolling from traditionalists (here defined as anyone who considers being able to read the time from their watch a priority), and often bafflement from those less au fait with the whimsy displayed at the upper echelons of watchmaking. But before you place yourself in one of those two camps, consider this: if you accept - as we all must - that the mechanical watch is an anachronism, then why not have some fun poking around at the edges of the envelope?
Certainly, there is a market for it. The avant-garde of watchmaking - led by brands such as MB&F, De Bethune, Urwerk and Richard Mille - is keenly aware of a strong collector base that thrives on watches that look like they were cooked up in a basement by HR Giger, HG Wells and John DeLorean, and produced by an army of perfectionists. Predominantly Hong Kong- and Singapore-based, these are serious watch buyers, who care about the watchmaking as well as the aesthetic, and value the steampunk ethos of highly complicated modern watchmaking. Such demand has fuelled a rich vein of watchmaking, with some extremely imaginative approaches to the simple art of keeping time, and ever-more recondite materials and techniques.
In the late 2000s, a number of brands began to experiment with sapphire components within movements and non-standard crystals on the watch face. But the quantum leap belonged to Richard Mille. The brand - already known for making pared-back, skeletonised movements that put everything on show - had produced a split seconds chronograph tourbillon movement and wanted to showcase it in an attention-grabbing watch. At the SIHH fair in Geneva in 2012, it unveiled the RM 056: the first watch with a case made entirely from sapphire crystal. This year, a piece celebrating the brand's ten-year relationship with racing driver Felipe Massa was announced, alongside a pink sapphire ladies' watch, the RM 07-02.
For years, sapphire has been the material of choice for a good-quality watch's "glass" (and see-through caseback) and sapphire crystals in standard sizes are factory-machined by the thousand. But if you get creative with the shapes required, the process becomes a lot more artisanal - and the shapes employed by Richard Mille, Rebellion Timepieces, Hublot and MB&F, which this year released a sapphire-cased variant of its bulbous HM6, are far from standard.
Five-axis CNC machines, the workhorse of the modern watch factory, do the actual milling and grinding, but that doesn't mean it is an easy process. Sapphire cannot be moulded, forged or cast; it must be milled from solid blocks, and with a hardness of nine on the Mohs scale (ultra-tough diamond is ten), it places a fair strain on the machinery, and that's before you start worrying about precision levels.
As Richard Mille himself explains: "To use an analogy that fits the discussion - producing and working with sapphire is like walking on thin ice. One wrong move and you fall through the surface. Sapphire is incredibly tough to cut, grind and polish. But it is also brittle. The watch's curved front and bezels, together with the caseband, need to match each other within microns and with no irregularities. If they don't, you must throw it all away, as you cannot adjust anything." Reportedly, the construction of the first RM 056 also resulted in some highly expensive machinery being thrown away, such was the difficulty of machining the cases.
Even when everything goes to plan, it's still a painstaking process. During the prototyping of the HM6 SV, MB&F founder Maximilian Büsser admits that "eight sapphire plates were broken before we mastered the first one. Once the process is mastered, the failure rate drops to around 20 per cent, which is still very high compared to other materials. The grinding is achieved piece by piece, because the raw material varies due to the alignment of the crystals." A single case takes 350 hours to make; it's a similar story for Richard Mille, whose RM 056 cases take 1,000 hours to machine and polish. That's right: despite sapphire's hardness, it comes out of the CNC machine in need of polishing before it's ready for use. Only five will be made in a year.
Büsser describes the overall process as "a combination of CNC action and manual artisanship"; each HM6 SV case is delicately polished by hand. On top of such intensive labours, there is the time spent redesigning elements of the watch which would normally be produced in titanium.
This hopefully explains why sapphire-cased watches have been the preserve of super-collectors and produced in extremely limited numbers. Until now, that is. In January 2016, Hublot released the Big Bang Unico Sapphire, a see-through version of its in-house chronograph, stating that it would be produced in a limited run of 500 pieces. (It also announced a much more limited run of sapphire-cased LaFerrari watches, whose rarity stems primarily from the movement). The watch features an unchanged Unico movement, with the three case components milled from sapphire. A transparent resin is used for the hands and numerals to complete the effect.
Also entering the transparent fray is Bell & Ross, with a (very) limited run of the BR-X1 chronograph. In distinct contrast to Hublot's approach, the watches will carry a six-figure price tag and most likely number in the single digits.
Creating watches cased in solid sapphire is enormously impressive. But without at all wishing to minimise the efforts involved, with dedicated minds at the task, the technical hurdles of such an idea will always eventually be overcome. Investing so heavily in the process as to make production at scale possible (relative to what has gone before, at least), as Hublot is doing, is in many ways more arresting.
Hublot CEO Ricardo Guadalupe tells of the same woes as Büsser and Mille, bemoaning that "It took about 20 years of research to produce components made of sapphire… and the final step of polishing sometimes reveals minimal defects in the material, meaning the failure rate is quite high", but cites certain "processes that we keep confidential that allowed us to reduce the costs". In fact, Hublot has invested "several million Swiss Francs in machinery" to enable it to bring the milling and polishing processes in-house.
MB&F and Richard Mille (and, no doubt, all independent watch brands working with sapphire) use specialist external suppliers such as Sebal SA and Stettler Sapphire to create their cases. Guadalupe says Hublot did partner with an outside supplier to develop the current cases, but has now committed to making sapphire cases in-house for several watches.
Consequently, the Unico Sapphire retails at £40,900 - hardly small change, but Richard Mille's RM 056 was produced in a limited run of five pieces at a time (as were its successors) and sold for $1.65 million (£1.17m) apiece.
According to Guadalupe, Hublot may well make even more than the 500 Unico watches: "What we want to do with sapphire is to be able to produce the largest quantity - up to 1,000 pieces." Nearly all of the original 500 are sold, he says.
That's still limited by Hublot's production standards - the brand makes about 40,000 watches a year - but to put it in context, H. Moser & Cie, which in 2015 produced a one-off Venturer Dual Time in sapphire, will only make around 1,000 watches in a year in total.
Hublot is also betting heavily on what has only ever been seen as an extremely niche proposal. But is it really so outlandish? The history of watchmaking is littered with examples that suggest not. When Audemars Piguet debuted the Royal Oak in 1972, stainless steel was so difficult to machine that the idea of selling serious quantities of a steel watch was viewed as lunacy. (The exhibition prototypes of the Royal Oak were actually produced in white gold because Audemars Piguet couldn't finish the steel cases in time).
How times change. We've recently seen similar stories with the use of titanium, carbon fibre and ceramic. All began as esoteric concepts; now they're seen as standard products. Low-volume production is what we expect from indie brands such as MB&F. But a powerhouse like Hublot, part of luxury giant LVMH, throwing its weight behind sapphire casemaking is interesting to say the least. Maybe one day, a transparent watch will seem no more oddball than a steel one. Maybe.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
