Letter 170 - It's time
It boggles the mind, the stuff there is to buy. So much stuff. And you’ve gotta keep buying or the economy will collapse into a mangled pile of shattered dreams and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?
And a result of the ‘make it and someone will buy it’ philosophy coupled with our world’s ever increasing population of numbnuts with vastly too much money burning holes in their manservant’s pockets (what, you didn’t think they’d tolerate pockets on their OWN pants, did you?!) is a plethora of super pricey gee-gaws that serve solely as a means to say “ha ha, I can afford this - can you?!”
.
.
.
.
The particular mechanical marvel that inspired this train of thought in my ever fermenting brain is one that carries the proud declaration
Yes, as you no doubt deduced, it’s a watch. But note carefully what the company has said. Not the most complicated watch ever made. That’d be the Vacheron Constantin 57260:
This puppy’s complicated no matter how you define complication. Which, by the way, is a watch term. A “complication” is just an additional “thing” that the watch can do besides tell you the hours, minutes and seconds. A date is a complicaton. Day of the week? Complication. How about a musical chime that strikes every hour? Or every fifteen minutes? Or or or, how about a watch that’ll chime in a special manner whenever you press a button and let you know the hours, quarter hours and minutes from the chime sequence? That sure sounds complicated, doesn’t it? That’d be a minute repeater and boy does that one cost a lot.
Well, this Vacheron Constantin has pretty much EVERY complication anyone has ever dreamed up. Fifty seven of them, in fact. Two thousand, eight hundred and twenty six parts, two hundred and forty two jewels and thirty one hands. Yikes! This guy will tell you the time FOREVER, automatically accounting for all those annoying months with different numbers of days and leap years and such.
I mentioned chimes before, right? This has all of them. A Grande Sonnerie, a Petite Sonnerie, a minute repeater and a “don’t chime - I’m sleeping” mode. It also has a “clunk” it makes if you drop it onto a hard floor. Try to avoid doing that.
And it’s only ten million bucks or so. Barely worth mentioning.
Annnnyway, like I said, the brag the company makes isn’t “the most complicated watch ever made” it’s “the most complicated” TIME ONLY watch ever made. Kind of like they’ve invented the most complicated hammer in the world.
Now let’s take a moment to recall what good designers around the world will tell you. The best designs are the ones that can do the job elegantly and simply. Minimum muss and fuss. The simpler the better because therein lies reliability.
We all know the KISS maxim, right? Keep It Simple, Stupid. If you can do the job with two parts rather than three - do it!
Well the company that makes this watch (Ulysse Nardin) is bragging that they’ve managed to do the most basic of watch tasks - simply telling the time - in the most overwrought and overcomplicated way imaginable. A normal watch has a few gears attached to a plate and as the gears turn the hands also turn. Simple. However, what if instead of the hands turning because gears are turning, we got rid of the dial and the hands and the crown and made the entire movement itself rotate around so as to tell the time?
It’s almost literally the scene in The Matrix where the kid tells Neo you don’t bend the spoon with your mind, you instead bend the world around the spoon.
And just to make it stand out to all our Richy Rich pals, Ulysse Nardin created an extra specially absurd watch - the Super Freak (their name, not mine). A watch with not just one tourbillon but two.
Okay, another aside. To answer the “What’s a tourbillon?” question you might now be asking yourself. ,k”?M?????????????????????????kkkkkkkkkkkkk././/
(Oops. Walked away from the keyboard and Sophie
decided she’d better enhance the text.) Starting over:
Okay, another aside. To answer the “What’s a tourbillon?” question you might now be asking yourself. Back in the day, in the olden tymes, men wore pocket watches. Which were kept, not surprisingly, in their pockets. And thus gravity lay heavily upon them, a gravity that always pushed in the same direction, as gravity tends to do. This was a minor, and I’m being quite literal when I say ‘minor’, problem for accuracy. You can imagine that if the watch were flat on a tabletop then there’d be no issue. But held vertically, as in a vest pocket, there would be some slight bias induced on the mechanism. And so Mr. Breguet, as mentioned in an earlier Letter, invented the tourbillon. Basically it allowed the tick-tick-tick mechanism of the watch to rotate continuously. Thus gravity was distributed evenly upon it and accuracy improved.
.
.
.
.
.
Again - this is a TINY thing. My seventy year old pocket watch is accurate to a second a day. That’s means a full two months go by before it’s off by a minute and it means the error of this watch is a mere 0.001 percent. Clearly not a biggie.
