Poetry Of Movement

Watch movements: they tick, they ring, they dance. And sometimes, they inspire.

- by Stuart Danker

This issue focuses on ‘Movement’. And while this theme is open to interpretation – dance, growth, emotions – it fits the subject of watches like a perfectly assembled, well, movement.

Besides the look and feel of a watch, a watch’s beauty also relies on its beating heart. In fact, it makes up half the decision when buying a new timepiece. While you can only arrange a bunch of springs and gears in so many ways to keep track of time, the ingenuity of the human race has seen some rather interesting contraptions.

Clock in, because we are going to explore what makes a watch tick, from the historically significant to those one-of-a-kind pieces that make you gasp in awe.

So Complicated

If we are going to talk about springs and gears, why not start with one of the most complicated arrangements to date? Enter the Vacheron Constantin Solaria Ultra Grand Complication.

The primary function of a watch is to tell time. But it would be useful if it could also track the date, or a different timezone. or the lunar cycle. Hence the various complications that speak of the ingenuity of engineering in the realm of watchmaking.

But this watch, through the Calibre 3655 movement, features complications that border on the territory of extravagant. Here is a number to kick things off: 41. The Solaria Ultra Grand Complication, hailing as the world's most complicated wristwatch at the moment, features 41 complications. It takes 1,521 components to complete the build (an average timepiece only has about 300 parts), with eight long years of development marking its journey from idea to reality.