Opinion / What are tourbillon watches and are they really worth US$250,000 or more? Timepiece complications explained
In mechanical watchmaking, the addition of every new function is a complicated task, and one ‘complication’ is more complicated than all others – today, more than 200 years since its invention, still very few companies can produce and service a tourbillon
This story is part of STYLE's Inside Luxury column.
The world’s most expensive watches have a mysterious feature.
When you look at some of the most expensive watches ever sold, there is a detail that seems to be ubiquitous within that group. Inspect most of those watches, like the Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4, and you will find a feature that makes the heartbeat of a real watch enthusiast beat at least 50 to 80 pulses higher than usual. That function is one of the most mysterious inventions ever. And maybe one of the most useless ones.
Let me explain. High-end mechanical watches are some of the most complicated machines ever imagined. The more functions a master watchmaker can cramp into a small case, the more complicated it gets. Thus, the watch world speaks about complications.
The power of complications
There are useful and relatively common complications, like the date function. While displaying the date sounds like a simple task, it is all but trivial. Unfortunately, our calendars sometimes have 30 days in a month, and sometimes 31. As if this was not enough, one month has 28, and, every four years, 29. Simple counting does not do the trick. Therefore, some ingenious watchmakers invented the annual calendar, that takes these fluctuations of the length of a month into consideration.
A watch that masters this nicely is the Patek Philippe Nautilus Annual Calendar Ref 5726A – which retails around US$50,000. Except for February, where the owner needs to adjust the calendar manually. To do the trick (including some other complications like a moon phase display), the watch needs 34 jewels and a total of 347 parts in its movement, much more than an ordinary wristwatch. In other words: in terms of mechanical watchmaking, this already is a very complicated task. There is a correlation between complication and price.