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- Citation :
- Quadruple-tourbillon Greubel Forsey is extravagant to the point of excess.
24 janvier 2007
- Citation :
- The quest for increased accuracy from mechanical movements is illogical and ridiculously expensive – but it does result in fascinating timepieces like this one
‘Greubel and Forsey… two watchmakers, the latter a Bentley fanatic, who have gone off on a grail-like quest of perfecting the tourbillon’
The watch and car worlds seem to attract their fair share of – how does one put it – nutters. Take the Koenigsegg supercar. It only manages a pitiful 242-plus mph, which is not even four times the legal limit, while at the other end of the scale my fellow Octane writer Simon de Burton told me about a man who puts large motorcycle engines (plural) into Smart cars, bringing them to a level of speed and acceleration that risks making them not just airborne but put into orbit… Most people who need to travel that fast take the plane, but where is the fun in that?
The same with watches. Extraordinary people go to extraordinary lengths to coax just that little bit more accuracy out of a mechanical movement, at supercar cost (north of £200,000), when in the real world if you are after pedant-level accuracy then quartz is the only way to go.
Take the example of Messrs Greubel and Forsey: two watchmakers, the latter a vintage Bentley fanatic, around 40 (so old enough to know better), who have gone off on a grail-like quest of perfecting the tourbillon. The tourbillon, as I am sure every reader of Octane is aware, is a device invented to compensate for the effect of gravity on watches in the vertical position: a rotating cage housing the escapement (which assists in the maintenance of regular beats). The vertical position because the tourbillon made its debut at the beginning of the 19th century, when pocket watches spent most of their time upright in their wearers’ pockets.
Nowadays the tourbillon has become le dernier cri amongst some watch brands, but the thinking behind the technology remains the same as it was a couple of hundred years ago. Greubel and Forsey felt strongly that the tourbillon needed to be brought into the 21st century and they left perfectly good jobs at Renaud Papi (a specialist movement maker – a sort of horological AMG) and Asprey to prove that a 200-year-old piece of mechanical sleight of hand, which had been developed to improve the accuracy of unreliable pocket watches, could be updated for the internet age.
At the beginning of the new century they set up their business in the mountain town of La Chaux de Fonds – the Detroit of the watch world – where the nature of their work is two-fold. First they develop movements for other brands, which gives them the income to indulge their passion for high-class, high-cost tinkering, or as they prefer to call it ‘inventing’. If not reinventing the wheel, they wanted to do the next best thing and reinvent the wristwatch.
In the end they have come up with what they call double and quadruple tourbillons. The double tourbillon is a normal tourbillon set at a 30° angle to the horizontal plane of the watch, which is itself set in a further rotating cage – what Greubel Forsey call the second tourbillon.
Working on the principle that if two is good, twice two must be better, the quadruple tourbillon features two such assemblies. They are indeed miracles of micro-engineering that are almost hypnotic to watch, and, even though production of Greubel Forsey pieces runs to just a couple of dozen a year, the business is doing well enough to be expanding to numerous workshops and sites around the town.
Is such a watch really worth getting on for a quarter-of-a-million quid? Look at it this way: supercars may go faster, but a Greubel Forsey has lower emissions.
Octane
Février 2007
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