Desire A Tourbillon For Your Collection?

Desire a tourbillon for your collection? Best go to the source.

- Alvin Wong

Abraham-Louis Breguet probably didn’t intend it this way when he developed his most famous invention back in 1801, but the tourbillon has become one of the most visual entertaining watch mechanisms in all of horological history. Indeed, even as it has fascinated generations of aficionados with its dramatic rotation, while housing within a tiny cage the very beating mechanical heart of a watch, the tourbillon wasn’t made to be theatrical. Rather, it was there to perform the rather boring and arduous task of cancelling out timekeeping errors caused by the effects of gravity on a watch’s movement – it was originally developed for pocket watches, which were kept mostly in an upright position.

Of course, the passage of time and horological trends have elevated the tourbillon into something else altogether. While modern watchmakers continue to tout the complication’s precision-enhancing virtues, the dramatic appeal of the tourbillon has been increasingly highlighted, sometimes to extreme lengths with watches featuring multiple tourbillons, or even multiple tourbillons with each rotating on a different axis.