Futuristic watchmaking from Ulysse Nardin
Ulysse Nardin is the cleverest watch brand that you’ve almost certainly never heard of, says Chris Hall
It can seem odd to talk of being modern or innovative in mechanical watchmaking. This is an industry whose product was supplanted by cheaper, more accurate quartz watches almost 50 years ago, after all. With most brands devoting their efforts to recreating designs from that golden age of the 1960s and 1970s, you could be forgiven for assuming that there isn’t much new ground being broken in horology.
However, while it’s true that most watches rely on movements the fundamentals of which haven’t changed in centuries, there is also a cohort of watchmakers doing some very clever things to improve the business of keeping time. And in that vein, Ulysse Nardin has a strong claim to have done the most to bring watchmaking into the 21st century.
It was at the start of the millennium that it unveiled a watch called the Freak. You don’t have to stare hard at the Freak to figure out what’s weird about it – there is no crown, no dial and there are no hands.
What you have instead is the gear train of the movement – the series of wheels that translate the slow unwinding of a spring into rotations of hours, minutes and seconds – arranged in a line and allowed to rotate around the watch once an hour. Adding an arrowhead to the tip effectively makes it one big minute hand, and another broad arrow denotes the hour. You wind the watch by turning the upper bezel, and set the time using a bezel on the underside.
Still, looking odd wasn’t what made the Freak important. It was the first watch to use a silicon balance spring and escapement. Silicon presents an answer to one of the most thorny problems in watchmaking – the fact that metallic parts need lubrication, and lubricants inevitably decay over time. Friction also hampers the precision with which parts can be made, to the detriment of accuracy. Abraham-Louis Breguet, godfather of all watchmaking, said, “Give me the perfect oil and I will give you the perfect watch”, as long ago as the 18th century.
Many of the biggest brands now use silicon hairsprings, but this remains controversial because it is perceived to run counter to the spirit of craftsmanship and tradition. Still, it’s hardly as if watches’ most intricate components – the ones replaced by silicon – are made in artisan workshops in any case.
Ulysse Nardin followed up the Freak with incremental improvements, and reached another landmark with the Innovision in 2007, which brought ten high-tech developments together for the first time. Now, a decade on, it continues to raise the bar with the concept watch Innovision 2.
Its Dual Constant Escapement – comprising one single, flexible, highly intricate piece of silicon – and lightweight balance wheels with blades to counter air resistance represent another step along the path of progress, as do the new winding system and rotating, 24-hour hour markers. The laser-cut glass “hand”, complete with
Blade Runner- esque neon luminova, ensures it looks as futuristic as it is.
You may wonder why this matters at all – aside from the natural human desire to forge ahead. But these watches have to be considered akin to concept cars – the ideas in them will permeate, in more palatable designs, over time. And Ulysse Nardin was instrumental in bringing that model to the wider watch world.
Since the launch of the Freak in 2001, it has become standard for mainstream brands to experiment with new materials, and the quest for improvements in timekeeping has been taken up by Rolex, Omega, Breitling, Cartier and Patek Philippe, among many others.
Most recently, Zenith has announced the Defy Lab, a watch that will see full production next year, using a singlepiece oscillator made from silicon. It promises to be accurate to within one second in three days (a good standard currently is +/- three to five seconds a day) and will be produced at a price, and in volumes, that place this technology firmly in the mainstream. And it all began with the Freak, that odd-looking watch from 16 years ago.
Chris Hall is editor of SalonQP.com
The laser-cut glass ‘hand’, with Blade Runner-esque neon luminova, ensures the Innovision 2 looks as futuristic as it is