Uncategorized

Electricity's Amber Roots

Our modern day English word electron and, by extension, electricity itself is rooted in the Ancient Greek word elektron, meaning "amber".

While he did not fully comprehend the magnitude of his discovery, Thales of Miletus is credited with the first recorded observations of static electricity, back in 585 BC, which he came upon after rubbing a piece of amber with animal fur. Further pursuing the ramifications of this discovery two millennia later, the Englishman, William Gilbert, coined the terms electricity, electric force, magnetic pole, and electric attraction, in his scientific book De Magnete.

Image credit Jon Edwards

Taking the Ultimate Longview

Patagonia seeds control of the company to a charitable trust charged with caring for the planet. All profits to be channelled into a charity to make that happen.

I continue to be impressed by the conviction and values of Yvon Chouinard and the approach he has taken to running Patagonia over the decades.

Rolex founder, Hans Wilsdorf, made a similar change to the ownership of Rolex and Tudor prior to his passing. By that measure, the future for Patagonia remains bright and the future of our planet better for it.

Image credit Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia

Is Orange the Apple Industrial Design Group's Favourite Colour?

Some convincing evidence, posited by Alex Cox and corroborated by Stephen Hackett in 2018.

If one were to include tints, tones, and shades in the mix, Apple's subtle variations on white over the years would be a heavy contender—beyond the iconic, white earbuds of the early 2000s, dating all the way back to a number of the early prototypes in Hartmut Esslinger's Snow White design language that dictated the look and feel of Apple's hardware in the 1980s.

Walking Cargo Vehicles

One of many illustrations created by Syd Mead for a promotional brochure distributed by US Steel in the late 1960s and early 70s.

US Steel would send the brochure for free to anyone who asked and nearly everyone in the art department at ILM, which produced the visual effects for Star Wars, had one. According to Joe Johnston, who was the visual effects art director on the film, this particular illustration served as the direct inspiration for the AT-AT vehicles in The Empire Strikes Back.

Image credit Syd Mead

Richard Mille UP-01

At 1.75 millimetres thick, fully cased, the latest from Mille is impressively durable given just how slim it is. Due in large part to its extensive use of titanium.

Necessarily doing away with a number of classical approaches to mechanical watchmaking in order to achieve this slimness, the novel caliber inside brings a handful of interesting touches to the table, most notably in the winding and setting works. While I'm not personally a fan of requiring a tool to wind or set the watch—particularly on a piece that's manually wound—the clutch to toggle between winding and setting appears particularly well engineered given the constraints at hand.

The dial being set in the same plane as the gear train is now commonplace in mechanical timepieces this thin, but Mille's approach lends the hands a comparatively improved level of resilience to any physical impacts the timepiece is likely to endure.

While I was somewhat concerned at first glance seeing them do away with the double roller and guard pin in the escapement, which are today standard shock-resistance safety features, upon further reflection it occurred to me that there are some workarounds Mille may have employed here that can neither be confirmed or denied in any of the promotional material I've seen and the 5000 Gs of impact resistance it was tested to speaks for itself.

One thing that is surprisingly notable in both the promotional photos and videos is the amount of dust and small fibers strewn about the movement, including a relatively large black fiber stuck to the top bridge of the going train right next the watchmaker's pointer finger in the above image. The voice-over talent in the linked video also gets some nomenclature wrong. At its 7-figure price point, one can only hope such oversights are not evident in the finished timepiece itself.

It's free-sprung, titanium balance wheel gets full thumbs up from me.

Image credit Richard Mille

The Space Traveller

The movement side of George Daniels' hand-crafted Space Traveler pocket watch, with two separate gear trains to indicate both mean-solar and sidereal time.

Prior to being called The Space Traveller, this timepiece was charmingly referred to as the Daniels Squared. A nod to the assistance of Professor Daniels, at Cambridge University, in helping George Daniels reduce the known error in the calculations used for the gear train by nearly a factor of four.

Image credit Daniels London & Sotheby's

Furlan Marri Black Sector

Andrea Furlan and Hamad Al Marri are back with a new, vintage-inspired timepiece.

Foregoing the mechaquartz route this time around, it's more expensive and less featureful than its predecessors, but still serves up impressive value in the current mechanical watch landscape with execution at this level.

Powered by the Japanese-designed, Swiss-made La Joux-Perret G100 caliber, it boasts a 68 hour power reserve, which is appreciably longer than the 48 hour power reserve of the Miyota 9015 that the G100 is based on and likely accounts for the slightly thicker movement architecture. While Furlan Marri could have opted for a less expensive caliber, it's always a welcome touch to have a power reserve long enough that you could take the watch off on a Friday night and still find it running with a reasonable amount of reserve when you go to put it back on the following Monday morning.

Image credit Furlan Marri

The World on Your Wrist

While the down-to-earth pricing of Moonswatch quickly went stratospheric after launch thanks to the extreme disparity between supply and demand, CIGA Design's Blue Planet remains available and affordable. With a domed sapphire crystal that mimics the atmosphere and a three-dimensional rendition of the earth that serves as the hour hand, coupled with a novel indicator for the minutes, the Blue Planet watch provides laudable design and horological value. At $929 USD for the stainless steel version, this just might be the least expensive way to get into a Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève winning timepiece that is still available for sale.

It's also worth noting that this timepiece is the first ever made in China to win the Swiss GPHG Challenge prize.

Image credit CIGA Design

Functional Lego Display

This fully-encapsulated OLED display inside of a run-of-the-mill-looking 2x2 sloped Lego brick, powered by a standard 9V Lego battery brick, is remarkable.

Created by James Brown using a slightly modified STM32F030F4P6 Cortex M0 processor, with 16K of flash memory and 4K of RAM, paired with a 0.42" QT1306P82 OLED panel. The final brick form itself is achieved through a combination of 3D printing and what appears to be a polyurethane casting technique (using Lego molds, no less) popularized by Keymacs.

Image credit James Brown

O for Observatory

In a partnership between Phillips, LVMH-owned Zenith, and renowned independent watchmaker, Kari Voutilainen, a never-before-sold series of vintage Zenith 135-O movements (regulated by Charles Fleck and René Gygax in the mid-twentieth century for observatory trials) are being expertly finished, cased, and brought to market.

Featuring a stunted escape wheel to accommodate a larger balance wheel for improved rate stability, the movement architecture is akin to the Peseux 260, another vintage, observatory-grade chronometer, which Voutilainen based his own series of Observatoire timepieces on. However, unlike the Peseux 260, the Zenith 135 has an extra pinion in the gear train for a center-seconds hand, and can readily be set up to indicate either central seconds or subsidiary seconds. Whereas the Peseux 260 is architected specifically for a sub-seconds layout. That said, like Voutilainen's Observatoire timepieces and as with the Zenith 135-equipped timepieces that have preceded this set, Zenith has opted to go with sub-seconds.

It's also worth noting that, while Voutilainen converted the Peseux 260 to a free-sprung balance system for improved isochronism, he was very intentional about his team leaving the regulating components in the Zenith 135-O calibers they received exactly as they found them:

“The persons working on these movements were the best watchmakers at the time. They had the know-how to make things precise. That precision doesn’t disappear after 70 years. Our duty was not to touch that performance.”

Image credit Voutilainen / Zenith SA

Rexhep Rexhepi Chronomètre Contemporain II

The original Chronomètre Contemporain by Rexhep Rexhepi, which debuted in 2018, was a masterclass in movement layout and finishing. The follow-up from Rexhepi packs greater complexity under the hood, while retaining its visual identity on the dial side.

Surpassing the movement that preceded it in specs on paper, that increased complexity lends the new movement an altogether different visual appeal that falls a stride short of the supreme elegance of its forebearer. The supersized breadth of the anglage and oversized spokes on the balance wheel seem almost caricature-like when posed next to the original.

I would be interested to hear more from Rexhepi himself about the thinking that went into bifurcating power delivery and, in particular, the changes to the balance wheel. In addition to the unusually large spokes, the modifications to the variable-inertia weights on the balance render it moderately more tedious to make precise timing adjustments in such tight quarters. Robin Nooy, over at Monochrome, has reported that the balance screws are responsible for the 60% increase in inertia at the balance wheel. However, it is clearly the increased girth of those spokes that account for the majority of that increase. Ideally, though, you want to move as much of that weight as possible to the outer rim, or felloe, of the balance wheel to optimize rate stability. Time will tell if this new balance design has staying power or whether it will mirror the trajectory of Voutilainen's Carbontime Fused Quartz Balance in the Rexhepi timeline.

At the end of the day, the execution of the finishing remains world class and it retains a free-sprung balance, so it's still got it where it counts.

Image credit Akrivia

Louis Erard × Massena Lab

Traditional in looks with nouveau execution. The stamped dial of the new Louis Erard Regulateur, featuring design direction from William Massena, serves up a pleasing aesthetic with typography that almost seems to float above the dial.

The broad form of the 'A' in Massena's logotype, well-suited to watch dials and informed by vintage watch typography, stands in stark contrast to the slimmer, more modern 'A' in Louis-Erard's logotype, which is derived from type designed for signage and screens.

Image credit Louis Erard via Watches by SJX

First to the Summit?

In 1924, British mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine set out to climb to the top of Mount Everest, nearly 30 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's successful ascent in 1953. Mark Synnott, author of The Third Pole, posits that photographic evidence of Mallory and Irvine's summit of Mount Everest may still exist from Irvine’s Vest Pocket Kodak camera.

I've long wondered whether Mallory and Irvine managed to make it to the peak—without supplemental oxygen, no less. Regardless of whether or not evidence ever surfaces that they did, Hillary and Norgay will forever remain the first to do it and live to tell the tale.

Image via Wade Davis

Hands-on With the OAK Collection

Ben Clymer, of Hodinkee, touches the tip of the ice-burg of Patrick Getreide's "One of a Kind Collection" (a.k.a. The OAK Collection) that is on display from May 19th to 25th, 2022 at the London Design Museum. One of the highlights includes a splendid tourbillon pocket watch, commissioned by Henry Graves Jr. in 1932, featuring a movement crafted by Pellaton for Patek Philippe.

While it may seem a little over-the-top for Getreide to employ a watchmaker for himself, when you consider the fact that servicing just one of the timepieces from his collection of over 600 rare and complicated timepieces would easily cost five figures at the manufacturer and potentially take years to get back, it makes sense. I have little doubt that maintaining this impressive collection for Getreide is both painstaking and a great pleasure for his watchmaker, Gabriel Tortola.

Image credit HODINKEE

Reticulating Precious Metal

While the open, arched indices on Philippe Narbel's inaugural ROOTS timepiece appear to have been 3D printed, that has yet to be confirmed. However, he has been very open about the fact that the texture in the center of the dial is crafted from sterling silver using a technique he stumbled upon by accident while studying to become a jeweller. That technique is known within the jewellery industry as reticulation and involves removing the copper content from the surface of sterling silver, or other precious metal alloy, and then proceeding to melt the core of the metal without melting the surface. As the surface is now pure precious metal and has a higher melting point than the alloyed metal below it, the liquified material below it deforms the surface as it heats and cools.

The linked video, by Andrew Berry, provides a full walkthrough of the process, from material preparation all the way through to punching out a desired section of the reticulated metal without damaging the texture.

Image credits Philippe Narbel

Benjamin Huntsman

An English clockmaker, born in 1704, credited with the invention of cast steel, which was far more consistent and reliable than the laminated steel that preceded it.

Borrowing techniques from glass blowers, Huntsman was able to heat the steel to a much higher temperature, paving the way for superior quality springs and other steelwork for horological purposes, among myriad other applications both within and beyond the borders of England.

Image source Crucible Steel Company of America Share Certificate