How the Watch Industry Plundered the Periodic Table

Okay, stop the presses. Because as you read this, three of the watch industry’s most venerable maisons—Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe and Breguet—are racing to create the first wristwatch from unobtanium. That’s right: a metal so rare that, as its name implies, it is all but unattainable. In order to achieve this, and then craft cases to house their quintuple-axis tourbillon, crystalline cathedral gongs, decimal minute repeater with Morse code distress signal function, they have to fly to Pandora’s moon and deep-mine this £40million-per-kilogram energy superconductor, allowing said chiming watch to blast sound at concussion-inducing levels louder than a Ritalin-addled Quasimodo ringing the bells of Notre-Dame.

Not to be outdone, Richard Mille, grand master of alternative material innovation, is at the final stage of crafting a watch case from a material that relegates even unobtanium to the bush leagues by its sheer badassitude. Because the RM0000 shall be made from none other than adamantium, the material that Wolverine’s claws are made of (Snikt!), the world’s hardest and most indestructible metal.

Equally keen not to be eclipsed, Hublot is at the precipice of unveiling a Big Bang crafted of the same lodestone owned and used by 6BC philosopher Thales of Miletus and which has been magnetized by the forcefield surrounding Zeus’s lightning bolts.

Okay, you’ve clearly caught me deep in my Burgundian cups, and thieving liberally from James Cameron’s Avatar, Marvel Comics’ X-Men and Greek history respectively. But the point is that over the last three decades the watch industry has donned its collective eye patches, rolled up its pirate boots, raised the Jolly Roger and joyously plundered the periodic table for increasingly exotic metal booty as alternatives to the traditional safety of the stainless steel, gold and platinum triumvirate. And I, for one, love the creativity and function that these alternative materials have brought with them to contemporary horology.

As an extremely overweight and overzealous cyclist, I was first introduced to the amazing performance properties of titanium and carbon fibre through advancements in bicycle frame technology. Likewise, motorsport and aviation have all made powerful advances by embracing new materials. So why not horology? But where did this unquenchable hunger for material innovation begin? Amusingly, the onset of the new material age had its genesis in two seemingly incongruous and unlikely venues. The first is the sleepy Swiss German town of Schaffhausen. The second is the oil-rich sultanate of Brunei.

Why Schaffhausen? Because this is where watch brand IWC is located and sometime in the early 1980s, they created, in collaboration with Porsche Design, the PD 3700—the world’s first titanium wristwatch. Why titanium? Because the metal is incredibly light, totally resistant to corrosion, hypoallergenic, amagnetic and, like Wolverine, has some capacity for self-healing, in that scratches form an oxide layer over themselves. But machining titanium cases proved tricky, as the resulting sparks had a tendency to combust. Case manufacturer Donzé-Baume (now owned by Richemont Group) had to develop a special technique for titanium milling and became so adept that they were soon creating the cases for the titanium Audemars Piguet Offshores, Panerai Luminor Marinas and Richard Mille watches.

Consumers loved both the stealthy allure of the material and the lightness on wrists it provided. IWC is also the very first luxury brand to create watch cases out of ceramic or zirconium oxide, and the fact that they pioneered the use of two of the most ubiquitous materials in modern horology deserves a major nod of respect. Okay, so why Brunei? Because this was the home of both Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah who was, in the context of the pre-tech billionaire era, the world’s richest man, and his slightly more #baller sibling, one Jefri Bolkiah. Prince Jefri was also the country’s finance minister. At one point he had billions of dollars in properties, homes, erotic artworks, cars, gem-set pimp cups, gold-plated helicopters and, yes, watches. And it should be said that, for all his financial lasciviousness, Jefri and his brother had great taste in timepieces.

Both men were the primary clients for watch designer Gérald Genta’s special order watches, which they bought in such concupiscent multitudes that eventually their agent in Singapore, and primary service provider of the Bruneian Royal Family, was inspired to buy out Genta—the creator of such bespoke icons as the GeFiCa, at the request of three big-game hunters by the names of Mr Geoffroy, Mr Fissore and Mr Canali—in the hopes of actualizing even greater profit.

What was interesting about the orders received from the small but financially mighty sultanate was that they expressed a clear interest in exotic, non-conformist alternative materials. Indeed it was said that, such was Jefri’s passion for lightweight exotic materials, he even had Genta craft him a minute-repeating tourbillon watch made in Iridium which was his pride and joy until he went swimming with it on and it melted.

Not to be outdone, the Sultan has been photographed in recent years wearing many and various watches demonstrating that his passion for non-traditionalist case materials remains gloriously unabated.

In the modern phase of exotic material experimentation, which really kicked into high gear in the last 15 years, the modern masters are Hublot, Richard Mille and Audemars Piguet. To this day my all-time favourite Richard Mille watch is the RM 009, made from a declassified satellite material named Alusic. This is aluminium and silicon spun in a centrifuge so that they bond at a molecular level, yielding a featherweight yet super-hard metal that, combined with a movement crafted from aluminium lithium, resulted in the world’s lightest mechanical watch at under 30 grams (until it was beaten by Mille’s RM 27, created for Rafael Nadal using a carbon fibre case and weighing 20 grams).

Audemars Piguet is also no stranger to exotic materials, exhibiting a past penchant for tantalum, a cobalt-based alloy named alacrite, and pioneering the technology for forged carbon fibre cases. Of these metals, tantalum exhibits a particularly appealing dark and stealthy lustre and was something of a signature material for the brand. Indeed, Audemars Piguet created their first tantalum watch at the behest of none other than King Juan Carlos of Spain, who so badly wanted a stealthy AP that he had his gunsmith flame-blue his Royal Oak, with somewhat mixed results. What, then, are the most exciting 2017/18 watches crafted from the latest space-age materials? Here is the list of my favourites:

Audemars Piguet Ceramic Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar

What’s impressive about this damnably seductive Royal Oak is that, beyond its heart-stopping good looks, it features a ceramic bracelet in which every single link had to be cast separately. The process takes 300 hours to assemble and finish which makes it the most handsome and—considering that ceramic has a Vickers hardness second only to diamond—the most robust Black Oak. It is particularly impressive that AP managed to brush-finish the ceramic to retain the model’s signature surface finish. Add to this the manufacture’s ultra-thin perpetual calendar complication and it’s no wonder this watch has a long waiting list, with watches on the secondary market commanding a huge premium.

Panerai Luminor 1950 Lab-ID Carbotech

Based on its roots as a military tool watch used by Italy’s Gamma Commandos during the Second World War, Panerai has continued a tradition of material innovation prioritizing the values of robustness and a stealthy appearance. This has resulted in the brand’s use of PVD-blackened steel cases as far back as the early 1990s with its Pre-Vendome Luminor Marinas, the adoption of titanium beginning with the model PAM 36 as well as the use of a ceramic aluminium-based composite, and now a proprietary form of carbon fibre named “carbotech”. In addition to its carbotech case, the new Lab-ID is made unique by a 50-year service warranty thanks to a movement that eschews all oils or liquid lubricants, using a self-lubricating base plate and bridges made of tantalum-based ceramic and a silicon escapement.

Montblanc 1858 Chronograph in Bronze

Here we switch gears from some of the world’s most advanced metals to one of its most ancient: bronze. Again, while it was Gérald Genta who brought us the first bronze sports watch with the GeFiCa, it took first Panerai with its famous Bronzo (of which there seem to be never-ending iterations) and Tudor with its Black Bay Bronze to kick-start the bronze revival. Since then the material has become one of the most popular, prized for the way it develops a natural and unique patina. Davide Cerrato, formerly of Tudor and now watch boss at Montblanc, brought with him a little of this bronze magic and its use in the vintage-themed 1858 chronograph results in a genuinely charming timepiece.

URWERK UR-105 Bronze Samurai Piece Unique for Revolution

Since the Bronze Age, men have cast and decorated the material into ornate forms. My favourite application of bronze has always been the cuirass (breastplate), shield, spear, sword and greaves of the Spartan soldiers. In homage to the culture of warriors, URWERK, my own magazine Revolution and former Purdey engraver Johnny Dowell, aka King Nerd, have embarked on a series of thematic engraved unique bronze watches, with the samurai-themed UR-105 timepiece the first amongst them.

IWC Big Pilot Watch Heritage Bronze

In one of the most charming launches of 2017, IWC—the company that pioneered titanium and ceramic luxury watch cases—offers its iconic Big Pilot, whose iconography is based on the firm’s legendary B-Uhren observer watches used in the Second World War, this time with a bronze case. The result is a watch that simultaneously bristles with pragmatic roots expressed by its massive hands, clearly demarcated dial, massive central seconds indicator and its distinctive fluted crown optimized to be easily adjusted, even with gloves on in the cockpit, as well as a warmth expressed by the warm, glowing bronze case that will subtly take on a patina over time.

Hublot Blue Sapphire

While Richard Mille was the first to offer a case made from sapphire crystal, Hublot, thanks to the modular construction of its case, was the first to bring the price of a sapphire down from Mille’s £1.4million asking price to the much more accessible £44,000. This year the brand also became the very first to successfully create coloured sapphire crystal timepieces and this blue model is nothing less than majestic.

Harry Winston Z10 with Zalium Case

Harry Winston’s Z1 triple retrograde chronograph sports watch, Zalium is a metal alloy that uses zirconium—the same material that ceramic is made from—to create a metal with a stunning grey stealthy hue not unlike that of tantalum, but much lighter and with extreme durability. This year Harry Winston’s signature Zalium case is combined with a handsome blue anodized aluminum dial bearing motifs meant to evoke the brand’s hometown of New York’s iconic skyline and bridges. Two retrograde indicators—one for seconds and one for the day of the week—add additional dial-side kinetic pyrotechnics to create a dramatic, mechanical, microcosmic spectacle on the wrist.

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