Masters of one of the world’s most revered forms of analog craftsmanship take on the smartwatch.
Pim Koeslag designs and fabricates some of the world’s most complicated mechanical timepieces. Especially ambitious is his Grand Tourbillon Minute Repeater, created for Ateliers deMonaco, a watch company he helped start. When I visited his bright, sunlit factory in Geneva in May, he opened a refrigerator-size safe to show me one of them.
“If you want to go for the real complex stuff,” he said, “here it is.” The watch, a gorgeous chunk of white gold, includes more than 400 painstakingly machined, polished and hand-assembled parts. One of them is a circular metal gong, struck by small hammers that mark the time with two-tone melodies. The watch’s mechanisms — including its “balance wheel,” whose oscillation is visible through an opening in the watch face — are so precise that the device loses or gains only two seconds a day. The Grand Tourbillon Minute Repeater sells for just over $200,000, and Koeslag has made just eight of them.
