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Horology is casting its gaze heavenwards in unabashed style, artistically alluding to our ultimate timekeeper, says
Nobody today really “needs” a mechanical watch to tell the time, but there is one horological feature that significantly impacted humanity’s chances of survival: the calendar. Knowing when to seed and harvest, or when animals start their seasonal migration, is why calendars predate clocks by thousands of years. And as luck would have it, nature kindly obliged us with the heavens – making the Earth, moon, sun and stars the cogs in our very first clock.
Thanks to the Ancient Greeks, who turned early ‘gnomons’ into more accurate sundials by pointing them parallel to the Earth’s skewed axis – i.e. at the pole star, Polaris – we’ve always known the constellations reappear at the same point on the same day every year. And from this, we have been able to wrestle our messy leap-year cycle into shape (but not without Pope Gregory XIII having to delete 11 days from 1582).
Earth’s elliptical solar orbit and consequent time deviations in terms of minutes could only be discovered once turret clocks became accurate enough, then added back to sundials as an inscribed equation of time. Most famously in mechanical form, horologist George Daniels married both star (or sidereal time) and mean solar time with his two Space Traveller pocket watches, singlehandedly crafted on the Isle of Man in the early 1980s, with one selling at Sotheby’s two years ago for around £3.5 million. With typically wry humour, he professed its usefulness for anyone on a “package tour to Mars”.
The humbler complication adorning Daniels’ masterpiece is the moonphase. Behind the dial of a traditional one is a disc depicting two moons, taking it in turns to wax and wane across the curved edges of the sub-dial aperture. While a 59-tooth wheel used to be good enough for a 29.5-day cycle (the full lunar phase), adjusting for a full day every two years and seven-and-a-half months, most watchmakers these days use a 135tooth gear, nudging the moon disc every 24 hours, one tooth at a time. This means – assuming you, then your grandchildren keep your watch wound – the indication deviates from the synodic moon phase by a single day every 122 years.
For Swiss watchmaker Andreas Strehler this wasn’t good enough. In 2016, he made his way into the Guinness Book of World Records with his Lune Exacte: off by one day in two million years. Strehler also wasn’t happy that you must wait for the new, full or two quarter moons to accurately set your watch. So, he framed his lunar display with a concentric vernier scale, allowing adjustments down to a precision of three hours, at any time rather than every fortnight.
As with so many other, rather more fundamental innovations in miniature, it was Patek Philippe which first beamed the moon from grandfather clock to wristwatch in 1925. Just eight years later, Patek cemented its celestial reputation with US industrialist Henry Graves Jr’s Supercomplication timepiece, featuring a northern hemisphere sky chart, as well as a moonphase and calendar taking into account that pesky 29th day appending each leap year.
Fast forward to this century and we have heady flights of fancy featuring planetary orrerys for the wrist including Jacob & Co’s Astronomia and Christiaan van der Klaauw’s Planétarium for Van Cleef & Arpels in 2014, while the IWC Sidérale Scafusia of 2011 brought sunset, sunrise, even twilight into the mix. This year, a whole capsule collection called Le Temps Céleste from Vacheron Constantin’s Les Cabinotiers charts the outer reaches, including a chiming tourbillon with sky chart rotating at sidereal speed, the constellation of Leo proudly astride the dial, in guilloché-engraved relief.
But as 2021’s galaxy of simpler novelties has proven, the lure of our lunar satellite always wins out. Oris’s Aquis Dat Watt Limited Edition diving watch even combines the moon’s other main attraction, the tide of the sea, using the affordable Swiss brand’s Pointer Moon hand. It overlays its 29.5-day wax-and-wane calibration with the corresponding northern-hemisphere tidal range, as a peanut-shaped white outline.
Headier still, women have been treated to some truly spectacular launches from Bovet 1822 and A. Lange & Söhne. The former’s Récital 23 has a moon that slips the surly bonds of the dial, floating its lunar dome above a mesmeric turquoise dial. Meanwhile, Germany’s finest uhrmacher is looking to the night sky presiding over the mountains above Glashütte. Its Little Lange 1 Moon Phase has been rendered in a midnight-blue wash of gold flux, sparkling with starry copper.
Jaeger-lecoultre also looked skyward this year to celebrate a 90th anniversary – that of the iconic Reverso – with the Reverso Tribute Nonantième (£33,400, see page 8). Its titular, reversible case flips over to reveal the new Nonantième’s secondary time-zone, quite unlike any other globetrotting GMT on the market. As if a digital jump hour wasn’t enough, a gorgeous 24-hour disc gleams and glows with an applied-gold sun and moon, reminding you whether it’s day or night back home, should you be wrestling with jet lag.