The idea of “new technology” in Swiss watchmaking seems rather oxymoronic – especially when you consider how much stock this rose-tinted industry places in heritage and hand craftsmanship. But as mechanical watches have reasserted themselves in recent decades, after near-decimation at the hands of quartz technology back in the 70s, the more forward-minded brands are distinguishing themselves from the competition beyond their glossy ad campaigns. In the process, theyre proving that a spring-powered concoction of levers and cogs neednt serve solely as an over-engineered status symbol.
To be fair, recent progress has largely been pre-occupied with miniaturising 19th-century pocket-watch mechanisms to wrist proportions. Not until 1999, when Omega adopted George Daniels revolutionary, friction-free Co-Axial escapement wholesale, then 2001 when Ulysse Nardin produced a version of its Freak spiked with mono-crystalline silicon, had any maker stepped beyond its comfort zone and attempted to make a better watch.
“Better?” you may ask. What could possibly make a mechanical watch better than an electronic quartz watch, when five grand has next-to-never a chance of buying you something as precise as a +/-10-seconds-a-year, twenty-quid Casio? But its not precision were talking here – after all, most of us are still perfectly fine with our Rolex Submariners +/-2 seconds a day. Instead, we refer you to the godfather of modern horology, Abraham-Louis Breguet: “Show me the perfect oil and Ill show you the perfect watch,” goes his famous adage.
In other words, show me a watch thatll tick on and on, without needing to clean and refresh its gunky, dried-out lubricants every five years. A watch that, despite its primitive clockwork, will outlive every cheapo quartz battery or every smartwatch software platform; always repairable in capable, tweezer-wielding hands and never obsolete.
Breguet was lamenting a lack of perfect oil (watchmakers oil is rumoured to be the second most expensive liquid in the world after the heavy isotope of water used in nuclear power reactors). But thanks to technology never available in Breguets day, the 21st centurys watchmakers are going one better: theyre removing the oil entirely. Thanks to the prevalence of other forms of personal tech that never existed in his day, theyre also battling a new threat to a wristwatchs delicate mechanics: magnetism.
Dr Daniels and Omegas Co-Axial escapement of 1999 is an ingenious solution to those irksome five-year services, where nothing at the movements beating heart slides against itself; things are instead nudged along, tick for the tock for the tick. But even Omega had to concede that Ulysse Nardin was onto something in 2001 with its weapon of choice: silicon. Both frictionless and anti-magnetic, silicon has proved to be modern horologys silver bullet. And 18 years on, its being adopted wholesale, from the entry-level luxury of Tissot up to Abraham-Louis modern incarnation. In fact, it was Breguet who led the mainstream silicon revolution back in 2006, in alliance with Patek Philippe and Rolex, all drawing on the resources of Neuchâtels Centre of Swiss Electronics and Microtechnology.
In collectively honing the process of deep reactive ion etching a silicon wafer, something like the escapements tiny, rocking anchor lever can be produced in hundred-strong batches, to tolerances less than a third of a hairs width, without the need for lubrication, plus its immune to the magnetism of your MacBook. Needless to say, silicon has since become a mainstay of modern horology – as proved by Pateks Advanced Research ref. 5550P perpetual calendar of 2012, Breguets now-ubiquitous silicon balance spring, and Omegas Master calibres, which boast service intervals of 10 years, a warranty of five years and certification by Switzerlands Federal Office of Metrology in resisting magnetic fields of 15,000 Gauss (a session in an MRI scanner, say).
Rolexs adventures in silicon remain under wraps for now, but we do know its working with another anti-magnetic technology, coating its metal-alloy balance springs with so-called Parachrom. When youre producing more than a million high-precision mechanicals a year, economies of scale and quality control take governance over experimental tech. That might sound like playing it safe, but Rolexs constant, incremental gains have made it the watchmaker it is. If youre venturing to the summit of Everest, theres no more reliable timekeeper to have by your side.
Making things out of mono-crystalline silicon wafers is no trivial undertaking, either. The clean suits and sci-fi laboratories may be at odds with the quaint vision of mountain-dwelling watchmakers hunched in chalet ateliers, but they share the same pursuit of precision. You might think of watch components as tiny, but the traditional metal ones are much heavier than they need to be, because they have to withstand the rigours of the manufacturing process. Cutting-tools in lathes and milling machines, however sharp, tear at the metal, hacking it off bit by bit, albeit on a microscopic scale. In contrast, plasma etching a silicon wafer simply vaporises the atoms, placing no stress on the material being shaped, so that very thin, light, components can be made in any shape you can draw.
Purists balked at first. But time has proven that silicon implants are by no means the emperors new clothes. As well as an intellectual exercise in itself – tantamount to the art of fine-finishing, which can add as much as 40 per cent to the value of a painstakingly hand-polished haute horlogerie movement – the European industry has realised that there is no reason why the Far East cannot produce top-quality mechanical watches of their own, not to mention buy them. In building a wave of patentable new technologies, Switzerland is maintaining an edge and upholding its reputation as the worlds leading horological community. In other words, staving off another Quartz Crisis, when the Far Easts affordable new tech caught the Swiss napping.
It has taken hold beyond the escapement too, beyond all expectations. Far from simply replacing steel or brass components like for like, the limitless forms and flexibility of silicon have opened a treasure chest of 21st-century possibilities. Essentially, the wholesale replacement of multi-component mechanisms with monolithic silicon constructs – 2D tendril frameworks that twitch, pulRead More – Source
