Complications, in general, are dumb. Tourbillons, in general, are dumb. Watch competitions, in general, are dumb.
But goddamn. That's the first time I've seen a crazy-stupid complicated watch I want. It actually makes sense. Not that I'd pay Park Avenue Condo prices for it but dayum.
Jesus I just had to add "tourbillon" to my computer's dictionary. What's happening to me.
You could slap a GPS receiver in a digital watch and have something that still worked when you went on vacation. Gears are cool and all, but I think they passed the typewriters and cassette tapes but for rich people mark several miles back.This is mostly due to the fact that times for sunup and sundown are specific to latitude, which means every watch is basically a custom order as you have to make the cams that control the movement of the hands for each individual watch depending on the location desired by the owner. I'd assume the same latitude specificity applies to the length of day indication as well; you'd need a different disk for each latitude (the indication of sunrise and sunset on the VC Celestia changes thanks to the rotation of a bi-colored disk hidden behind the slit on the dial).
Yours for $800. I mean, dude. It's over a million dollars and if you need the tides at two breaks, you have to buy another. You know that game where people find the stupidest thing they can run Linux on? This is kind of like that but for insanely wealthy people. (apropos of nothing, I love that guy's accent and hair, and I love that VC made a like $15m watch, quantity 1, by finding a rich dude and saying "dude you're rich we'll make you anything" and then calling the thing "57260")You could slap a GPS receiver in a digital watch and have something that still worked when you went on vacation.
Gears are cool and all, but I think they passed the typewriters and cassette tapes but for rich people mark several miles back.
There are still fans of a mechanical calculator around. Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame is one of them.
Adam Savage and I agree about a lot of stuff. We both own Yes watches, for example. My uncle used to rally against guys who used Curtas. They were made fun of for carrying pepper grinders around but they won a lot. I've been following them off'n'on on eBay for 20 years now and they have yet to come down to my comfort level, but I certainly appreciate them.
"NEEEEEEERD!"?My uncle used to rally against guys who used Curtas.
It has... two sides... It's extremely functional. So much so that the functionality is suffocating on such a little clockface. I recognize that you have to make it small to put it all in, but that's not good design. Not that I'm complaining. Whoever made this is fantastically skilled at... uh... horourgy ("time-/watchcraft") — far beyond whatever I'm capable of.
Despite the suffocating amount of information, it's still very balanced and well-designed. If it weren't for the excessive detail in the star map I'd almost call it minimalist in comparison to what it shows. It's horology, from the Greek horo meaning time (hour has the same root) and logos meaning subject matter. Could also be used as a backhanded insult to someone visiting the red light district, come to think of it. Fun fact: the Dutch word for watch is horloge, which we loaned from the French, but they now use the word montre for watch and horloge for clocks or timepieces.
I was going for the craft of watchmaking, specifically — in the same way that blacksmithing is the crafting derivative of metallurgy.
Ah, like that. It's établissage you're looking for. Because of course there's a French word for that. edit: some more Googling around tells me that its meaning is more about assembly and less about the component manufacturing, but still...
Horourgy. I insist. It's fun making up words with ancient roots.
The two-sided thing isn't uncommon among the higher end. Jaeger Lecoultre have been selling the Reverso since like 1931, for example. As manufacturers cram more and more functionality into the things they totally run out of room, and as such take to the back. You're right about it not being good design... on an absolute scale. There's far too much information in far too little room. But "far too much information" has been a selling point of watches for a very long time. Anything beyond "telling time" is a "complication" and that includes coaxial seconds. Vacheron Constantin claim to be the first maker of "complicated" watches in 1790. I mean, take that Reverso. The argument could be made that if you need a white watch and a black watch, buy two goddamn watches after all you're rich enough to afford a six thousand dollar Reverso. But that's not how they sell them.
That first one is like one of them double-barrel revolvers... or this: It's odd how a TV/DVR combo is considered to be worse at both, but a double watch is a mastercraft.
The first one is not like that - it's a movement with hands on both sides. Really, it's just another complication. Double-barrel revolvers or "this" are curiosities marketed to the lunatic fringe of the gun community so there are certainly similarities but a double-barreled Colt 1911 made in Italy is basically a perverse riff on a century-old design. It's also a mere $5k which, in the land of highly-collectible firearms is chump change. There's nothing odd about it. A TV-DVR is a bad TV and a bad DVR melded together in an attempt to save money for consumers that can't afford both. A Drilling? that's a shotgun and two long rifles melded together in an attempt to make a rich consumer spend more on one gun than he would on three combined. One of the bases for Bitcoin was the observation that money is nothing more than sunk time. Engraving and ornamentation always costs more because an artisan had to sit there and do it. European trade goods went for outrageous values in the New World because New World consumers had no anchor for the amount of sunk time that went into glass beads, for example. A TV/DVR combo demonstrably takes less effort to make than a TV and a DVR, while that ridiculous double-barrel Colt above goes for eight times what a Colt 1911 goes for simply because some crazy Italians have to make them a few at a time.It's odd how a TV/DVR combo is considered to be worse at both, but a double watch is a mastercraft.
Meh. This is why I'd make a terrible super-wealthy guy. I'm just not into stuff like this as it is not very practical. I have a super computer in my pocket that keeps atomic time, has multiple planetariums on it, alerts me to bright satellite passes, tracks the planets across the sky and cost me less than any of these watches. Oh, and I can make phone calls and get my email, text messages etc on it as well. Watches are neat, and the engineering and mechanics interest me, but I'd not buy one.
They are, beyond a doubt, jewelry first and functional items second. A chronometer rating means they're accurate to a second a day. It's interesting. The industry spent like fifteen years trying to figure out if they could charge fashion prices for phones, but Vertu went tits up over the summer. Apple does have their stupid expensive iWatches but those are purely for halo effect and anchoring and smartwatches are commoditizing even faster than phones. But Harry Winston - making watches. Van Cleef & Arpels - making watches. Cartier - making watches. Chanel - making watches. That? That's a new gilded age ramping up. And the guys making $50k VC Patrimonys are leading a much nicer lifestyle than the guys making $300 Apple Watches.