Let’s face it: a fine mechanical watch is, in spite of its inherent timeliness, a deliberate anachronism. That delicate, tick-tick-ticking concoction of wheels, springs and levers is based on ancient principles that have barely changed in 200 years, keeping worse time than the plastic digital that fell out of your cereal box in 1986.
Even more remarkable is that watchmakers have tried to improve things over the centuries, getting little further than George Daniels’ recent ‘co-axial’ invention – and only Omega gets dibs on that.
So what is it that ties Switzerland’s tweezer-wielding boffins to their workbenches, when they could easily be enticed down from the Jura Mountains by any of Geneva’s micro-engineering firms? How were the thronging halls of horology’s Geneva and Basel trade shows so Alpine fresh this January and March?
It turns out that the cutting edge isn’t so much the clockwork ticking inside (which still, crucially, retains the ability to make your own heart tick faster) as its packaging. The cutting edge is exactly that: the ever-more-extreme ability to mill, machine and polish the watch case in all manner of innovative new materials more at home in the suspension wishbone of an F1 car.
Up until now, the march of materials science has been slow and steady: from the ethereal sheen of Rado’s tungsten-carbide ‘Hardmetal’ cases in the Sixties, to Porsche Design and Citizen’s unprecedented use of titanium in the Seventies, to the debut of appropriately glossy ceramic in the Eighties (Rado again). Then, with the turn of the century, Richard Mille turned things up to 11, harnessing first what was only inevitable for every high-end brand with their logo on an F1 car or America’s Cup catamaran: carbon.
As we profiled two years ago, carbon has since been used by watchmakers in all its forms – fibre sheet, forged fibre, even its ‘buckyball’ nanotube and graphene allotropes. So where are we in 2019? As it transpires, ingenious combinations of all the above – carbon, titanium, ceramic, plus resins, glass, good-old-fashioned gold, you name it. And besides all their requisite benefits, from hardness to lightness, how a novel material looks on a watch now shares equal importance.
Supplied to Ulysse Nardin by new French start-up Lavoisier Composites, Carbonium is a spectacular new take on carbon fibre – and, in particularly ‘2019’ style, between 40 and 50 per cent more eco-friendly as Lavoisier source 95 per cent of its raw material from aeronautical offcuts.
They fuse under high pressure two-thirds carbon fibre and one-third epoxy ‘glue’, yielding a marbled substrate with a beguiling, almost iridescent sheen. The open-worked movement of Ulysse Nardin’s Skeleton X gets an even more luxurious framework this year thanks to Carbonium Gold, which, as you’d expect, adds precious metal threads to the mix. The effect is like walnut burr – the favoured wood panelling of Eighties limousines.
Across from Ulysse Nardin at January’s SIHH trade fair, another materials first was debuting at Girard-Perregaux’s stand, with a similarly dazzling aesthetic. Information is still scant regarding the ‘carbon glass’ case of the new Laureato Absolute Chronograph, but the mystic shimmer of this composite could be nigh-on alchemical. Apparently a fusion of carbon and blue glass, it’s like a detail from Van Gogh’s The Starry Night – and allegedly 100 times harder than steel, with a density close to 1g/cm3, so it ‘could’ float on water. (Given the ‘normal’ chronograph’s price tag of £10,000, we wouldn’t advise it.)
Definitely sinking, but in a good way, were the new diving watches unveiled at Girard-Perregaux’s SIHH neighbour, Panerai. The cult watchmaker, formerly a Florentine kit supplier to the Italian Navy, has mastered all manner of up-to-the-minute materials for the iconic ‘cushion’ form of its cases, be it ‘metallic glass’ BMG-TECH, ceramic or the layered carbon-fibre sheets of its proprietary ‘Carbotech’.
For this year’s reduxed Submersible line, humble titanium is brought to the fore once more – in ‘Eco’ guise. Encasing a special edition devoted to brand ambassador and all-round explorer hardman Mike Horn, the metal is relief-etched into the bezel with the prominent numerals and calibrations polished to render a striking interplay of dark and light grey. The Eco-Titanium itself is from French mining and metallurgical group Eramet, which has set up Europe’s first aviation-grade titanium recycling plant. Like Lavoisier and its carbon, Eramet harvests turnings and scrap from major aircraft manufacturers and their subcontractors.
It is estimated that by 2020 100kt ingots of titanium (that’s about a third of the Empire State Building) will need to be produced, mostly to satisfy the industry and aviation sectors. By recycling the scrap, Eco-Titanium’s recycling channel will prevent the emission of 100,000 tonnes of CO2, because it consumes four times less than the conventional ore-based production channel.
A fraction of those ingots will be required at IWC, as well as Panerai – this time in combination with another notoriously tricksy material: ceramic.
The Swiss-German watchmaker is already something of a whizz with ceramic (see also this year’s ‘Beige Ceramic’ Pilot’s Watch Chronograph Top Gun, glowing with ghostly sandiness), which is impressive for anyone as, during the sintering process, it shrinks by about a third, affecting the minuscule tolerances required for water-resistant watch cases. It also can’t be machined after sintering because that could cause it to split.
Read more: The best watches for less than £1,000
The addition of titanium changes all that. IWC’s so-called ‘Ceratanium’ cases – debuted last year for the Aquatimer diver and revisited for the new ‘Top Gun’ edition of the Double Chronograph pilot’s watch – combine the lightness and toughness of the metal with the smooth aesthetic and scratch-proofness of ceramic. The case parts are milled, turned, drilled and polished into their finished shape before they are put in the oven. The sintering process causes a structural change in the titanium alloy that causes a ceramic-like coating to bond directly to the surface, lending a distinctively sinister black sheen that’ll never scratch.
As well as beige ceramic and Ceratanium, IWC’s new casemaking factory, opened last year, is having even more fun with the Pilot’s Watches this year, pioneering its new ‘Hard Gold’ for the top-end tourbillon model. Details remain secret for now, but we’d hazard a guess it’s made comparably to Hublot’s similarly silly-of-name ‘Magic Gold’, whereby the iconoclast watchmaker’s in-house metallurgy lab ‘fuses’ 24-carat gold with a ceramic matrix to produce scratch-proof 18-carat gold.
That’s old news for Hublot, though. Away from all the Ferrari, Fifa and Usain Bolt hype, genuinely groundbreaking innovation continues back at the factory. And its latest material gains are with sapphire crystal – a totally transparent and ultra-resistant material whose machining process is so complex that its use in watchmaking has thus far been restricted to the ‘glass’ covering the dial. The idea of using sapphire for the entire case – let alone a Big Bang case, with all its separate components and their minuscule tolerances – was almost inconceivable until recently.
Not only has Hublot democratised its use, while Bell & Ross, Richard Mille and Greubel Forsey’s sapphire pieces command a stratospheric premium, but the brand has pioneered coloured sapphire, even managing to grow the raw crystals beneath its own roof.
To imbue the new Spirit of Big Bang’s yellow hue, Hublot fused copper with aluminium oxide, while managing to conserve all of sapphire’s beneficial properties as a case material: as hard and scratch-resistant as diamond (nine on the Mohs scale, versus ten for diamond) and as light as titanium, at 107 grams on the wrist.
Sunny, sinister, stealthy, shiny: whatever your disposition, Swiss watchmaking has the material for you.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
