Celestial Complexities

From devising proxies to approximate a far more complex reality, to developing timepieces that do the same, we've always sought to simplify the ways we mark the passage of time. Blancpain's new perpetual calendar timepiece is, perhaps, the perfect microcosm of these efforts

- JAMIE TAN

If you happen to own a perpetual calendar, you just had the rare pleasure of watching the date switch from February 29th to March 1st because this year just so happens to be a leap year. In the digital age, such timekeeping idiosyncrasies are trivial but it took some effort to get here. By some, of course we mean a whole lot! Thus, although this story celebrates the new Blancpain Villeret Quantième Perpétuel (which is simply an archaic French term for perpetual calendar), we must set the stage properly for its grand entrance. The mechanical perpetual calendar is, after all, the very summit of what watchmakers have achieved over the course of millennia. Actually, given that digital timekeeping and even the atomic clock are merely the latest and most accurate technical measurements of time that humanity can manage, we posit here that any future measurement technique should be considered a descendant of the humble sundial.

Following on from this, we can say that horology’s key pursuit is timekeeping – to accurately measure and display the time. You may be surprised to hear that even the top executives at watch brands, including Marc A. Hayek over at Blancpain, always tell us that they are in the business of pursuing excellence in chronometry. While this seems straightforward, it is anything but. Instead, timekeeping is perhaps better approached as a multifaceted discipline that requires control over various interrelated factors; chronometry is a big word that encompasses many aspects of watchmaking.