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Dubai debates innovation in watchmaking
Exhibitions

Dubai debates innovation in watchmaking

Sunday, 22 November 2015
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Christophe Roulet
Editor-in-chief, HH Journal

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5 min read

Innovation was at the centre of discussions during Dubai Watch Week. For certain of the independent watchmakers in the spotlight during the event, an exclusive timepiece is as much a demonstration of horological tradition as a quest for innovation.

The first Dubai Watch Week proved to be a who’s who of just about every independent watchmaker, invited by Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, the region’s foremost retailer with 65 points of sale. In this particular branch of horology, the association of product and maker is especially strong, and the region’s collectors were understandably eager to meet the men behind the mechanisms. As Philippe Dufour so eloquently puts it, “the more exclusive the product, the more important it is to meet the hands that created it.” While this approach to the measure of time favours all forms of traditional watchmaking, the role of innovation cannot be ignored and was indeed the subject of a round-table discussion. Here’s what two of the contributors had to say.

What is watchmaking about, other than time and precision?
Jean-Marc Wiederrecht
Agenhor, putting the watchmaker first

Watchmaker Jean-Marc Wiederrecht needs no introduction. As the founder of Agenhor, his work was distinguished not once but twice at this year’s Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, with two of the winning timepieces – Slim d’Hermès QP and Fabergé Lady Compliquée Peacock – housing movements by the Genevan firm. He may be recently retired, passing the torch to his sons, his vision of watchmaking remains as sharp as ever. “What is watchmaking about, other than time and precision? If new technologies such as LIGA [a German acronym for lithography, electroplating and moulding] can contribute to progress in precision, then I’m all for it, because we are working towards a clearly defined objective that would be impossible to reach using nothing but human capacity. The problem today is that the big brands are taking industrialisation to the extreme, with the result that watches are now made by operators rather than watchmakers. It’s time we came back to our roots and told customers a real story. All the more so as these days no-one buys a mechanical watch for its precision. Quartz is far superior in that respect.”

For Jean-Marc Wiederrecht, it’s high time we put the watchmaker back at the centre. “Watches are made by people,” he says. “What can new technologies contribute in this context? Take silicon, for example, which is used more and more for the parts in the regulating organ and the escapement. Personally I’m against it. It makes no sense whatsoever. Why replace human dexterity with machines? This is a perfectly legitimate question with regard to traditional watchmaking. We know full well that we’ll never do better than a rate variation of a few seconds a day for a mechanical watch, however perfect it may be. We’ve entered the watch’s physical limits.”

Now HYT is preparing its equally intelligent successor.
HYT, breaking the mould

HYT has chosen to push these physical limits, though not necessarily in terms of precision. Instead, the brand’s engineers have focused on fluid mechanics as the basis for a system that displays the time by means of a pump. Giving the lie to the age-old principle that a mechanical movement is at its best when barricaded against liquids, they have invented a new breed of watchmaking which, in some respects, harks back to an age when time was measured by the flow of water in a clepsydra. A totally off-the-wall approach which CEO and shareholder Vincent Perriard assures us has hit the mark. The brand has sold 700 watches since the H1 was launched three years ago, and 2015 is proving to be an excellent year with sales increasing by 45% to 400 timepieces. At a time when many watchmakers are feeling the pinch, Vincent Perriard is all smiles when he announces the five new jobs that will be adding to the current forty-strong workforce, which includes 22 chemists. A smile that breaks into a grin when he pushes up his sleeve to reveal HYT’s latest exploit: the dynamo backlighting of the H4 Metropolis.

“Our clients are collectors in search of the ultimate degree of innovation. A collector will fall for an Audemars Piguet then progress naturally to Richard Mille, and may well continue to HYT in his pursuit of watches that meet a technical challenge. We still have quite a few surprises in store for them to discover. When developing our first watches, we had to resolve the problem of temperature difference which affected precision. We did this through a thermal compensator. Thanks to this research, we learned how to capture temperature differences. Even a variation as small as 0.1° or 0.2° creates vibrations, hence energy, and we’re building on this to develop a movement that will derive energy from temperature changes in the fluid it contains.” In 1928 Jaeger-LeCoultre invented the Atmos which runs on energy from changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure. Now HYT is preparing its equally intelligent successor.

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