My design for a mul­ti­ple watch winder

Many objects made by human hands through­out his­tory speak to the need to accom­plish some­thing extra­or­di­nary. Often such objects sim­ply arise from a single-minded ded­i­ca­tion and a fair bit of skill. In other instances, such an unusual object could only result from the meet­ing of maker and benefactor.

no 106 Breguet

One intrigu­ing exam­ple of the lat­ter is the Breguet watch no 106 designed for Marie Antoinette. It is a tour-de-force of 18th cen­tury horo­log­i­cal tech­nol­ogy com­mis­sioned in 1783 (with no time frame and an unlim­ited bud­get) as a gift by an anony­mous admirer. It wasn’t com­pleted until 1827 — after Marie had been sent to the guil­lo­tine and Breguet had passed away. I’ll refrain from com­ment­ing on the polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and soci­etal cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the cre­ation of this watch but its recent his­tory serves as a book­end for a story that’s a sure can­di­date for a com­pelling film plot. The mas­ter thief Na’aman Diller, a per­fect heist, an unsolved case and a one-of-a-kind watch made for a queen.

With its rock crys­tal faces — it was clearly intended to fully dis­play both the effort that went into its mak­ing and the won­der of its 23 “com­pli­ca­tions”. But more ger­mane to this story is the fact that Marie Antoinette was the first cus­tomer for Breguet’s self-winding watch design called the per­pétuelle.

The self-winding mech­a­nism of a mechan­i­cal watch is depen­dent upon the move­ment of the watch wearer to spin an out-of-balance fly­wheel con­fig­ured as a pen­du­lum whose back and forth move­ment is uti­lized to keep the watch wound. This in turn is pred­i­cated upon the owner actu­ally wear­ing the watch …
And, in the case of a watch such the No 106 Breguet, this is vitally impor­tant since the halt­ing of the watch mech­a­nism means not just man­u­ally wind­ing the watch but reset­ting (with­out a key­board) each of its var­i­ous com­pli­ca­tions as well.

So pic­ture your­self a col­lec­tor of con­tem­po­rary and vin­tage mechan­i­cal watches. (Check out the Breguet site for an exam­ple of the cur­rent state of affairs). You own a col­lec­tion of watches — many with mul­ti­ple com­pli­ca­tions and maybe even a few with the leg­endary tour­bil­lon mech­a­nism. To insure they are all ready to wear with­out tedious adjust­ment of the mech­a­nism they must be kept wound. Sure, you could spend your morn­ings going through the col­lec­tion man­u­ally wind­ing each watch in turn (or maybe strap them all to your arms, don a full black cape and go for a nice long stroll.) But as it hap­pens, the eas­i­est way to keep them all tick­ing is to arrange a means of sim­ply rotat­ing them on the mechan­i­cal axis for a given num­ber of turns per day and all is well.

Maybe some­thing like this … Strap the watches onto the rotat­ing and spin­ning arms and set the whole thing in motion.

The com­mon solu­tion is more like this:

Oribita Avanti 12 watch winder

A nice cab­i­net with indi­vid­ual winder mech­a­nisms for each watch. Sim­ple, effi­cient and to-the-point.

But take another look at the Breguet no 106 above. The watch is a minia­ture mechan­i­cal cir­cus act in a glass case. There were much sim­pler watches even in Marie Antoinette’s day (she reput­edly car­ried a sim­ple® Breguet watch to the guil­lo­tine.) Such a watch served the time keep­ing func­tion quite sat­is­fac­to­rily. It’s clear from a review of the cur­rent offer­ings that the typ­i­cal watch winder of the present day is a philosopi­cal sib­ling of the sim­pler Breguet.

So I won­der why such mechan­i­cal poetry as is dis­played in the no 106 might not also find its way into a watch winder. Clearly most per­petuelle own­ers would be inclined to have their watch col­lec­tion han­dled by a winder like the Orbita Avanti. But surely some­one would enjoy hav­ing the watch-tending chore man­aged by a more engag­ing mechan­i­cal con­trivance such as the design that begins this posting.

As it turns out, I was com­mis­sioned to pur­sue this very idea.

More next time …