Parmigiani Fleurier has unveiled two new limited-edition wristwatches inspired by antique pocketwatches from a collection owned by Parmigiani Fleurier’s parent, the Sandoz Foundation. Both wristwatches are part of Parmigiani’s Toric collection. Find images, prices and wallpaper inside.

The pocketwatches that inspired the new wristwatches are on view in New York at the well-known vintage-jewelry and Russian-art gallery À La Vielle Russie. They are part of an exhibit called “Mechanical Wonders,” featuring 50 pieces from the Sandoz Collection, and running through Nov. 26. Watch lovers will be familiar with many of the items because they are normally on view at the famous Musée d’Horlogerie in Le Locle, Switzerland.

The first new wristwatch has unusual telescopic hands that get longer or shorter as they rotate around the oval dial. It was modeled on a pocketwatch from the early 19th century, also oval, with similar hands. The new watch is $95,000. There will be 30 pieces in rose gold and 30 in white gold.

The other new watch is a minute repeater with a serpentine cathedral chime that shows the time by means of an arc-shaped aperture on the upper half of the watch face. The numeral designating the hour traverses the arc, moving along a 60-minute scale as it does so. The watch was modeled on an engraved, minute-repeater pocketwatch made sometime between 1800 and 1840. Parmigiani will make just four of these watches, at $668,000 each.

When watchmaker Jan Silva got his first glimpse of the innards of the A. Lange & Söhne Grande Complication 42500 pocketwatch, made in 1902, his heart sank. He saw that restoring them to anything resembling a working movement would be a Herculean labor.

The year was 2001. The watch had been brought to A. Lange & Söhne’s headquarters in Glashütte, Germany by a married couple at the request of the watch’s owner, an elderly ex-housekeeper who had received the watch more than 50 years earlier as a gift from her employer. The owner wanted to know if it were worth repairing: time had turned it into a gunked-up, rusted mess.

“Where there would normally be a complex, delicate mesh of bridges, springs and wheels, there was nothing to be seen but a gray-brown, amorphous mass,” Silva recalls in a book about the watch, entitled Grande Complication No. 42500, which A. Lange & Söhne published earlier this year.

The Grande Complication movement before work began.

Now, 5,000 man-and-woman-hours later, Silva and his four-person team at A. Lange & Söhne have restored the watch to mint condition, and it is in the midst of an A. Lange & Söhne-sponsored world tour with stops in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing and, finally, Glashütte.

The restored masterpiece.

The watch is a grand complication in the true sense of the term, meaning that it has a perpetual calendar, a split-seconds chronograph and a minute repeater (it also has grande and petite sonneries). It is the most complex watch ever to bear the name A. Lange & Söhne. (The original A. Lange & Söhne company, which made the watch, was dismantled after World War II. The modern-day A. Lange & Söhne was founded in Glashütte, the same town that was home to the original firm, in 1990.) The company says the Grande Complication has an estimated value at $2.3 million. In 1902, its first owner, a Viennese named Heinrich Schäfer, bought it for 5,600 gold marks, which, according to the Grande Complication book, is what a villa in nearby Dresden would have cost at the time.

The book gives a wheel-by-pinion account of its reconstruction. It’s a tale of serial setbacks. Just as Silva was ready to get to work, in August 2002, Glashütte was hit by a devastating flood. The Grande Complication was untouched by it, but Silva had to shift his attention to a group of historic pocketwatches, kept in a vault in the Lange building’s cellar, that had been damaged.

The movement took three months to dismantle. Screw heads had broken off, and Silva had to devise clever ways to remove the screws. Other parts were nearly inseparably stuck together by a mortar of rust and grime. “The whole job was like a detective’s search for clues,” he recounts in the book. “I exposed layer after layer, and some of the hidden components were so badly eroded that not even their shape could be reconstructed, let alone their function…”

He cleaned and kept as many of the 833 components as he could (most of the chronograph mechanism was beyond redemption); the rest he and his fellow watchmakers fabricated by means of spark erosion, painstaking milling, and hand-filing and polishing. He stamped the new parts “fecit 2004” on their undersides.

Not long after work began, Silva had to revise his estimate of the project’s duration: from one to three or four years (it ultimately took five).

He was already far behind schedule when he came to most difficult part, the gongs. He could find no guidance from any source as to how to recreate them. To remove the gongs’ rust, he consulted with restoration experts at Dresden’s famous Mathematics-Physics Salon, a museum containing antique timepieces and other measuring instruments, and decided to use a galvanic process. Once the gongs were clean, he saw they were so corroded they would need to be replaced. He fashioned new ones, a major task, in part because he couldn’t tell what the originals were made of. Once finished, the new gongs proved unruly, chiming arbitrarily and mistaking 10 o’clock for 11 o’clock. He solved the random-chiming problem; the 10 o’clock confusion cured itself.

The movement, gleam restored.

On the original gong block, the piece of metal used to fix the gongs in place, Silva saw the initials “JAP.” They stand for Jules Audemars and Edward Piguet, founders of Audemars Piguet in Le Brassus. That company may in fact have made the entire movement, the book says. “It is possible that the whole raw movement was made there before being delivered to Germany, where it was improved by A. Lange & Söhne. At least, this was standard practice at that time, as most watch manufacturers in Europe procured raw components from Switzerland and then processed them further in accordance with their own ideas.”

In contrast with the movement, the watch case, made of rose gold, was nearly perfectly preserved. It was designed by the architect and industrial designer Carl Ludwig Theodor Graff, based in Dresden. The watch’s front cover bears the head of the goddess Minerva; the back is engraved with the initials “GS,” but whose initials they are no one now knows.

He or she probably couldn’t tell the 2010 version of the watch from the 1902 one: it has the same case, dial and crown. But the current owner will surely note the nearly $2.3 million difference the restoration has made. A. Lange & Söhne did the work free of charge; in return the owner merely had to lend the piece to the company for promotional purposes.

When Montblanc unveiled its Metamorphosis watch at the SIHH watch show in Geneva in January, many believed it would be years before the exotic new chronograph would be ready for market. After all, the watch, with its 567 components, seemed hopelessly complex. The prototype on display was kept behind glass: it didn’t work well enough for a live demonstration.

That was then. “At the end of October, I will have the first real piece in my hands,” says Montblanc CEO Lutz Bethge, who, on a recent trip to New York, met with WatchTime to discuss the brand’s 14-year-old watch business. Another piece will come out in January, and from that point on there will be five or six per year until the series of 28 watches is complete.

The watch, shown below, is named for its ability to transform itself, in a matter of seconds, from a watch telling only hours, minutes and seconds, into a chronograph. When the wearer pushes a slide on the side of the case, four wing-like shutters open, and the new dial appears as if by magic. The watch’s price is also other-worldly: $297,000.

Out of reach as it is, the Metamorphosis underlines two important points for Montblanc, according to Bethge. First, it reinforces the brand’s identity as a maker of chronographs, which have been its strong suit since Montblanc got into watches. “All over the world, the interest was in chronographs from the very beginning,” Bethge says.

Second, it marks another step in Montblanc’s campaign to earn its bona fides in mechanical watchmaking, which company executives admit has not been made easier by Montblanc’s far-greater fame as a maker of pens. The Metamorphosis movement is the work of Montblanc’s haute horlogerie operation, the Institut Minerva de Recherche en Haute Horlogerie, located in Villeret. Montblanc’s parent company, the Richemont Group, bought the Minerva company in 2006 and put it to work making ultra-high-end mechanical movements for Montblanc. In addition to the Metamorphosis, which was actually designed by two independent watchmakers, Franck Orny and Johnny Girardin, Minerva has also turned out a couple of unusual tourbillon models: the Grand Tourbillon Heures Mysterieuses (launched in 2009, below left) and the ExoTourbillon Chronographe (from this year, below right). The idea behind joining Montblanc and Minerva was to help Montblanc raise its watchmaking profile among connoisseurs.

That campaign had actually started several years earlier, when Montblanc began cutting down its quartz-watch collections and focusing on mechanicals instead, Bethge said. The latter now account for 65 percent of Montblanc’s watch-sales volume. Because the brand’s sales have shifted so dramatically toward mechanicals, the average price for a Montblanc watch has doubled in the past five years, he said.

The real hero in Montblanc’s battle for mechanical-watch clout, according to Bethge, is the Nicolas Rieussec, a monopusher chronograph made in-house at Montblanc’s factory in Le Locle (it was Montblanc’s first in-house movement). The watch, named after the inventor of an early chronograph, has unusual seconds and minutes counters consisting of rotating disks rather than rotating hands. The watch was introduced in 2008.

“If you want to identify the point when suddenly Montblanc appeared on the [mechanical-watch] landscape, then it would be the Rieussec,” Bethge said. “When we came up with the Rieussec watch suddenly we saw significant growth in the number of new customers who are really watch customers rather than Montblanc brand customers.” The company is still fulfilling orders for the Rieussec that were placed in 2008.

Montblanc’s Nicolas Rieussec chronograph.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Rieussec, which sells for $9,600 in steel and about $30,000 in gold, will be the focus of much attention in the future. There is now an open-dial version of the watch, launched last year, and a model with silicon escape wheel and lever, which came out this year. More versions are on the way (including one next year that Bethge declined to describe). “I think the Rieussec offers us a lot of opportunity,” Bethge said.

He believes the Rieussec movement and Minerva’s string of high-end creations together give Montblanc a strong hand in its bid for haute horlogerie legitimacy. “It shows we have a couple of instruments [at our disposal], and that more and more customers do understand that Montblanc is a serious watchmaker,” he said.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz was a real devil.

Or at least people thought so. In 1758, Jaquet-Droz, whose name lives on in the high-end mechanical-watch brand owned by the Swatch Group, scared so many people with his mysterious, other-worldly machines that he was suspected of witchcraft.

That year, Jaquet-Droz, an erudite clockmaker from the Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, brought his finest pieces to Madrid to show King Ferdinand VI in hope of drumming up some business in Spain. They were no ordinary clocks: they had figures – people, animals, birds – that moved by themselves as if propelled by magic, or by Satan. One especially fearsome clock featured a dog that lurched forward suddenly and barked when anyone removed an apple from the basket of the dog’s master.

King Ferdinand was amused, but few others were. All but the king fled in fear when they saw the clocks. Most believed Jaquet-Droz was possessed. To clear his name, he asked to meet with Spain’s Grand Inquisitor. After demonstrating the clocks and explaining how they worked, he managed to convince the Spaniard that he should not be jailed (or worse).

It was as a maker of such amazing automata that Pierre Jaquet-Droz, along with his son, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, and adopted son, Jean-Frédéric Léschot (the three were business partners) would achieve fame that has lasted to this day.

Their best-known automatons were “The Writer,” “The Draughtsman” and “The Musician.” The first, a barefoot, three-year-old boy, could write a message containing as many as 40 characters on a piece of paper, his eyes following his pen as it moved. The second, also a young boy, could draw one of four pictures, pausing occasionally to blow the dust off his paper. The third, a young woman, could play five different melodies on an organ by pressing keys on a keyboard, bowing sweetly after each tune.

The three were completed in the 1770s and shown at royal courts across Europe. Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI saw them (one of the draughtsman’s drawings is believed to depict the royal couple). The hoi polloi could admire them, too, for a fee: Pierre Jaquet-Droz rented a hotel room in Paris and sold admission tickets to the curious. (These days the curious can see the automata in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Neuchâtel.)

Although Jaquet-Droz is most famous for his clocks and automata, which were sold all over the world (the company had a huge following in China), the company was also greatly admired for its watches. The noted timepiece historians Eugène Jaquet and Alfred Chapuis write in their book, Technique and History of the Swiss Watch, “The watches made by this house were of a quality as nearly perfect as possible, sometimes embellished with complications, such as music or singing birds, and tastefully ornamented, usually with enamel.”

The company flourished, reaching its zenith just before the French Revolution, when it had workshops in three cities: La Chaux-de-Fonds, Geneva and London.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz died in 1790 in Bienne, where he had moved after retiring. Henri-Louis survived him by just one year. Léschot kept the business going until sometime in the early 1800s, when lack of demand for luxury products forced him to close it. The brand was largely dormant until the Swatch Group bought it in 2000.

It could have been worse. Last year, Swiss watch companies eliminated “only” 4,200 jobs, compared with the more than 5,000 that some officials had predicted. Employment is now 49,097, a decline of 7.9% from 2008, and nearly the same as in 2007. Manufacturing jobs were hardest hit, declining 9.8%, to 36,275.

These figures come from the Convention Patronale de l’Industrie Horlogère Suisse (CP), an organization that represents Swiss-watch-industry employers. Twenty Swiss-watch companies went out of business last year, meaning a decline of 3.2% in the total number.

Because 2008 was a record year for employment, it could be argued that a drop of 8% from that level wasn’t really that bad: despite the decline, employment last year was at its second-highest level in 30 years. Over the past five years, the industry has had a net gain in jobs of nearly 23%.

The number of Swiss-watch-industry apprentices actually increased last year, by 36, a 3.7% gain over 2008, the CP said.

More good news, kind of, came from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. Exports of Swiss watches to the world’s top 30 watch markets grew 19.7% in the first six months of this year over the same, admittedly dismal, period in 2009, when they fell 26.4%. For the month of June alone, they were up 35%.

The value of Swiss watch exports for the six months was 7.30 billion Swiss francs ($6.95 billion). Despite the gain, Swiss watch exports were still 11.9% lower than in 2008. Hong Kong remained the top market for Swiss watches (it’s the entry port for watches destined for much of Southeast Asia), and had a gain of 37.9%. Exports to the United States, the second-biggest market, grew 12.5% (30.6% for June alone) to SF757.7 million, or $721.6 million (this is a whopping 36.2% lower than the figure for the first six months of 2008). Mainland China lived up to its reputation as a red-hot luxury-goods market, posting an increase of 90.6%. It was the fourth-largest customer for Swiss watches, right behind France, buying SF482.7 million ($459.7 million) worth of them during the six months. Among the top 30 markets, only the Czech Republic, number 29, showed a bigger increase: 302.7%. Among the top 10 markets, Japan (#7) and Germany (#8) were the only ones to show decreases, of 8.6% and 5.3%, respectively.

Source: Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (.pdf format)

How much do you know about self-winding watches, past and present? Sharpen your pencil and set that cerebral rotor a’spinning. Answers, as usual, appear at the end.

1. Which of the following automatic watches was launched first?
A. Zenith El Primero
B. Eterna EternaMatic
C. Rolex Perpetual
D. Omega Centenary

2. Which watchmaker is widely believed to be the inventor of the automatic winding system in use today?
A. George Graham
B. John Harrison
C. Louis Cotter
D. Abraham-Louis Perrelet

3. Which company makes what are often called “clones,” i.e., near copies, of ETA’s most popular automatic movements?
A. Sellita
B. APRP
C. Dubois Dépraz
D. Ronda

4. Which watch has a self-winding system with a linear oscillating weight rather than a rotor?
A. TAG Heuer Monaco V4
B. TAG Heuer Pendulum
C. DeWitt Academia
D. Parmigiani Bugatti

5. Which of the following Rolex watches is NOT an automatic?
A. Air King
B. Datejust
C. Cellini Prince
D. None of the above. They are all automatics.

6. Which two companies were the first to introduce automatic watches with microrotors?
A. Hamilton and Breitling
B. Buren and Universal Genève
C. Heuer and Omega
D. Leonidas and Movado

7. When did the first Japanese-made automatic watch come out?
A. 1935
B. 1942
C. 1950
D. 1956

8. An unusual feature of Carl F. Bucherer’s in-house, self-winding Caliber CFB A 1000 is its
A. Two winding rotors
B. Rotor made of synthetic sapphire
C. Rotor that moves around the periphery of the movement
D. Rotor more than twice the normal thickness

9. What company uses the Magic Lever in its automatic winding system?
A. Seiko
B. Montblanc
C. Rolex
D. Patek Philippe

10. Who was John Harwood?
A. The Aegler engineer who designed the Perpetual movement
B. The ETA engineer who designed the 7750
C. The inventor of bi-directional winding
D. None of the above

11. Which of the following was an early automatic wristwatch?
A. The Zig-Zag
B. The Wig-Wag
C. The Autorist
D. B and C

12. Which two automatic-winding-related events occurred in 1948?
A. The patent on Rolex’s Perpetual winding system expired.
B. Eterna doubled the efficiency of the winding system then in widespread use.
C. LeCoultre introduced the first series-produced wristwatch movement with power-reserve indicator.
D. A and C
E. A and B
F. B and C

ANSWERS:

1. C. The Rolex Perpetual was introduced in 1931. Developed by Rolex’s then-movement-supplier Aegler, it incorporated the most effective and trouble-free winding system ever devised, consisting of a rotor mounted on the back of the movement that winds the mainspring as it spins around its axis. The same principle is used in nearly all automatic watches today. The Zenith El Primero, an automatic chronograph, came out in 1960. The EternaMatic came out in 1948. The Omega Centenary was also introduced in 1948, which was Omega’s centennial year.

2. D. The Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Perrelet is widely believed to have made the first self-winding watch, in or around 1770. He actually made two types of automatic systems during his long career (he died in 1826 at age 97, and worked until at least age 95). One was the type we know today, with a rotor spinning around a center pivot. The other worked by means a weight that moved to and fro.

3. A. The company makes movements that are interchangeable with, and very similar (although not identical) to ETA movements whose designs are now in the public domain. These are the SW 200-1 (meant as a replacement for the ETA 2824-2), the SW 300 (for the ETA 2892) and the SW 500 (for the ETA 7750).

4. A. The TAG Heuer Monaco V4 is wound by means of a 4.25-gram platinum ingot that moves up and down a track between the four spring barrels.

5. C. The Rolex Cellini Prince, introduced in 2005 and modeled on the Rolex Prince launched in 1928, has a rectangular, hand-wound movement visible through the caseback.

6. B. During the 1950s, watch companies were eager to bring out automatic movements that were fashionably slim (a standard, full-sized winding rotor, which sits atop a movement, adds thickness). Both Buren and Universal Genève patented winding devices that used “microrotors,” small rotors that were set into the movement rather than on top of it, and hence did not add to the movement’s height. Buren did so first, in 1954. The company incorporated it in its Super Slender line in 1957. Universal Genève did not apply for its patent until 1955, but that year, before the patent had been granted, incorporated a microrotor device into its Polerouter watch. (The first Polerouter, which came out in 1954, had a “bumper” type of winding device incorporating a weight that moved back and forth.)

7. D. It was Seiko that brought out the first Japanese automatic watch. That the company lagged far behind the Swiss industry in making self-winding watches was due mostly to World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War that preceded it. During the war years, the company shifted production from civilian wristwatches to war materiel. In addition, imports of foreign-made watches stopped almost entirely, so the domestic industry had no incentive to improve and update its products.

8. C. The CFB A 1000 is wound by means of an arc-shaped weight that moves around the edge of the movement. Its main advantage is that, unlike a traditional rotor, it allows a view of the entire movement.

9. A. The Magic Lever is a two-armed device that drives a winding wheel in one direction, by either pushing it or pulling it, depending on which direction the winding rotor is turning. Seiko engineer Tsuneya Nakamura invented the Magic Lever in 1959 (he later became president of Seiko Epson). The Magic Lever is still used by Seiko today.

10. D. John Harwood was a British watchmaker who, in the 1920s, resurrected the 18th-century concept of the winding rotor and applied it for the first time to a wristwatch. Harwood, who fought in World War I, was inspired to design a self-winding watch when he observed the damage done to soldiers’ watches by dirt entering the cases through the crown-stem hole. The watch he designed needed a crown for neither winding nor setting; the latter was done via the bezel. The design, which he licensed to several companies, was not a success for technical and other reasons, and Harwood went out of business.

11. D. The Wig-Wag movement, introduced in 1931 by a company called La Champagne, served as its own winding weight: the entire movement slid back and forth within a frame. The Autorist, which also came out in 1931, was also an oddity: it was wound by means of the watch lugs, which were tugged on by the strap when the wearer moved his wrist.

12. D. The expiration of the patent for the Perpetual winding system in 1948 brought on a flood of new automatic watches designed on the same principle. Also that year, Jaeger-LeCoultre brought out its Powermatic, an automatic with a power-reserve indicator in the form of an arc-shaped aperture at 12 o’clock. It was the first production-model wristwatch with such an indicator, although Breguet had made a one-of-a-kind power-reserve watch in 1933.

Watchmaking has its own mini-language: a set of French terms with specific horological definitions. Match the following words with their meanings. The answers appear at the bottom in the form of 3-C, 5-G, etc. (To find out how to pronounce these words, see Part 2 of our Pronunciation Guide in the WatchTime.com “Reference Center” section.)

1. guilloché
2. rattrapante
3. anglage
4. ébauche
5. sonnerie
6. ligne
7. tourbillon
8. monopoussoir
9. remontoir
10. carré
11. chablon
12. chaton
13. foudroyante
14. perlage
15. reglage

Here are your definitions:

A. Square, used to describe square watch cases

B. A movement blank, i.e., a movement without its balance, escapement or mainspring. Translates literally as “rough draft” or “outline.”

C. Device consisting of an escapement enclosed within a tiny rotating cage. Its purpose is to eliminate timing errors caused by the effects of gravity on a watch’s balance. Translates literally as “whirlwind.”

D. A ring, often made of gold, in which a watch jewel bearing is set. Its literal translation, “kitten,” has no apparent connection to its horological meaning.

E. Winding mechanism

F. Engine-turning, a technique for decorating a metal surface, often a watch dial, using a machine called a “rose engine.”

G. Chronograph operated by a single button rather than the standard two.

H. A split seconds chronograph, i.e., a chronograph with two superimposed chronograph seconds that can be used to time simultaneous or consecutive events. At the end of the first event, the watch-wearer stops one of the seconds hands; the other continues running. After he records the first time, he pushes the chrono button and the stopped hand jumps forward to catch up with the other seconds hand. The word translates literally as “to overtake” or “to recover.”

I. A set of unassembled watch-movement components.

J. A chronograph seconds hand that rotates faster than the standard one rotation per minute. Some such hands are contained in a subdial, and rotate once per second. Others rotate around the main dial once every 10 seconds. Translates literally as “lightning,” as in “lightning quick.”

K. Chiming mechanism that sounds either on demand, when a button or lever is pushed, or automatically at certain intervals of time (such as hourly) or at a preset time

L. Beveling (used on the edges of many plates, bridges and other movement components)

M. A decorative finish consisting of small circles

N. A unit of measurement used to denote watch-movement diameters. It is equal to 2.256 millimeters.

O. A watch-manufacturing operation in which the movement’s rate is corrected to obtain acceptable precision

Ever wonder how your watch got its name? Test your knowledge of watch-brand handles by matching these brand names with the explanations of the origins. Answers take the form 1-C, 2-G, etc. Good luck!

Your list of brand names:

1. Citizen
2. Omega
3. Hautlence
4. Bell & Ross
5. Frédérique Constant
6. Casio
7. Girard-Perregaux
8. Seiko
9. Oris
10. Maurice Lacroix
11. Movado
12. TAG Heuer

Match the brands to these explanations of their origins:

A. This brand was named after a brook and a valley near Hölstein in the northwestern part of Switzerland, where the company was founded in 1904.

B. This brand’s name means “always in motion” in the artificial language of Esperanto. The language was founded in 1887 by an ophthalmologist from what is now Poland. Within a few years it gained a following in Canton Neuchâtel in the Jura mountain region of Switzerland, and some schools, including the region’s main business school, began teaching it. It was therefore “in the air” in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in Canton Neuchâtel, when Achille Ditesheim and his brothers named their watch company in 1905.

C. This name combines an acronym for a holding company with the name of a long-established brand the holding company purchased in 1985.

D. This name first appeared on a watch in 1924 and it was chosen by the company founder at the suggestion of a friend who was the mayor of a large city. The mayor suggested the name because it connoted affordability: the watches the company made were inexpensive enough for all.

E. This brand name means “precision” in its home-country’s language. It first appeared on a watch in 1924. The company founder had used a similar name for the factory he set up in 1892. That name disappeared in 1983 when a factory built in 1937 was renamed.

F. This company’s founder used an anglicized version of his last name when he christened the small-electronics and cigarette-holder company he founded in 1946. The company diversified and grew quickly after that. It began making watches in 1974.

G. This name was derived from the last names of the company’s two French founders. One was a fan of American product design from the 1940s and ’50s, and the other was a fan of the American entrepreneurial spirit, and they wanted to give their company an Anglo-sounding name. The company was founded in 1994.

H. This brand name is an anagram of “Neuchâtel,” the Swiss city where the brand, founded in 2004, is based.

I. This name is a combination of the first names of the grandfathers of the company’s founders, Peter Stas and Aletta Stas-Bax.

J. This brand name is derived from the 19’’’ caliber the company introduced in 1894, which was very successful because of its design and its low cost. In 1903, the company added this brand name to its existing name, “Louis Brandt & Frére.” In some contexts this name connotes perfection, which is why the company chose it for both its movement’s name and, later, its own name.

K. While most compound watch-brand names are combinations of the names of two founding partners or merged companies (e.g., Jaeger-LeCoultre, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin), this name is the last name of a single founder who followed a Swiss custom of adding one’s wife’s family name to one’s own upon marrying.

L. This brand name comes not from the founder, but from an executive in the silk-trading division of the Swiss trading company Desco de Schulthess Ltd. When Desco decided to launch a watch brand, it wanted to give it a fancy sounding French name. As it happened, one of its employees had such a name. Desco launched the watch brand in 1980. The man whose moniker was used had nothing to do with it other than lending it his name. He died in 1999.

ANSWERS:

1 – D

2 – J

3 – H

4 – G

5 – I

6 – F

7 – K

8 – E

9 – A

10 – L

11 – B

12 – C

How much do you know about the various quality seals and certificates awarded to watch movements these days? Find out by taking the WatchTime test. As always, the answers appear at the bottom.

1. Which of the following is required for a movement to receive the Geneva Seal?
A. The escape wheel axle must be set in rubies.
B. The bridges must have Geneva stripes.
C. The movement must have a screwed balance.
D. The jewels must be set in gold chatons.

2. Which of the following brands only sells watches with movements bearing the Geneva Seal?
A. Vacheron Constantin
B. F.P. Journe
C. Roger Dubuis
D. Richard Mille

3. The Geneva Seal requires that a movement be accurate to what mean deviation per day:
A. -4/+6 seconds
B. -3/+5 seconds
C. -5/+6 seconds
D. None of the above

4. Which of the following is NOT true of the Patek Philippe Seal?
A. Its precision standards are the same as those of COSC (Contrôle officiel suisse des chronomètres).
B. It has different requirements for tourbillon and non-tourbillon watches.
C. All new Patek Philippe watches on the market bear the seal.
D. The tests for the seal are administered by Patek Philippe itself.

5. Which brand in 2009 announced that thereafter none of its watches would be stamped with the Geneva Seal?
A. Bovet
B. Patek Philippe
C. Harry Winston
D. Piaget

6. How many movements were certified by COSC in 2008, the latest year for which the COSC has released figures?
A. 974,284
B. 1,599,588
C. 2,473,207
D. 3,378,359

7. What percentage of COSC certificates were awarded to Rolex in 2008?
A. 28
B. 38
C. 48
D. 58

8. After Rolex, the company that received the highest number of COSC certificates in 2008 was
A. Omega
B. Breitling
C. Panerai
D. TAG Heuer

9. How long does COSC spend testing each movement?
A. 3 days
B. 10 days
C. 15 days
D. 1 month

10. What percentage of COSC certificates went to quartz movements in 2008?
A. 22
B. 15
C. 8
D. 4

11. Which of the following Swiss towns has a quality seal named after it?
A. Fleurier
B. Tavannes
C. Bienne
D. Le Brassus

12. The chronometer testing facility in Glashütte, Germany, differs from COSC in that it
A. Tests cased, rather than uncased, movements
B. Tests watches in 6 positions
C. Tests watches at 4 temperatures
D. B and C

ANSWERS:

1. A. There are 12 requirements that a movement must meet to earn the Geneva Seal. One is that the axels of all the wheels in the gear train, plus the escape wheel, be set in rubies.

2. C.

3. D. The Geneva Seal does not have any requirements regarding the watch’s precision. They pertain only to the finishing of the movement.

4. A. The precision requirements are stricter for the Patek Philippe Seal than for COSC certification: movements with a diameter of 20 mm or more must be accurate to -3/+2 seconds per day, versus the COSC standard of -4/+6 seconds per day. Another difference: Patek Philippe has different requirements for tourbillon watches than for non-tourbillon ones: the former must be accurate to -2/+1 seconds per day.

5. B. When it announced its new Patek Philippe Seal at Baselworld in 2009, the company said it would no longer be using the Geneva Seal, which all its movements had borne until then.

6. B. The figure represented a 8.6 percent increase over the prior year.

7. C. Rolex received 769,850 certificates. It has for many years received more COSC certificates than any other company.

8. A. Omega received 377,514 certificates. It was followed by Breitling (234,021), Panerai (46,446) and TAG Heuer (35,429)

9. C. During the 15 days, the movement’s accuracy is checked in five positions and at three temperatures.

10. D. In 2008, COSC awarded 62,638 certificates to quartz movements. Breitling received the vast majority (56,224) of them.

11. A. The Fleurier Quality Foundation seal was established in 2001. It is awarded to watches on the basis of both technical and aesthetic criteria.

12. A. The four-year-old facility, owned by the German company Wempe but operated by an independent laboratory, uses the same timing tolerances as COSC but, unlike COSC, tests the movements in their cases.

Movement maker BNB Concept is out of business. But its founder, and many of its watchmakers, have found a new gig.

Just months ago BNB Concept seemed to be smokin’. The Swiss maker of expensive, complicated movements for brands including Hublot, Concord and Bell & Ross, was being praised in press reports for its “phenomenal” growth. BNB’s founder and majority shareholder, Matthias Buttet, gave interviews describing the company’s 200% annual sales increases, recession be damned.

Matthias Buttet

The company was selling, yes, but getting paid was apparently something else. On January 18 the company, which had been based in Duillier, near Nyon, closed its doors.

One big reason was a huge portfolio of accounts receivable, which one source said amounted to more than $9 million, that BNB could not collect. Suddenly, the company behind such talked-about watches as Jacob & Co.’s 31-day Quenttin and Romaine Jerome’s Day and Night (it has two tourbillons, but doesn’t tell the time) was no more. Buttet told one Swiss paper he had tried to sell the company, but its heavy debts had scared away all suitors. In its heyday, BNB, founded in 2004, had more than 30 customers and employed some 200 people, including the small band of elite watchmakers Buttet had chosen to make branded, artisan watches under the banner “Confrérie Horlogère.”

Now Buttet (he’s one of the “B’s” in “BNB”: the other “B” and the “N” are Enrico Barbasini and Michel Navas) is starting a new chapter. Last week, Hublot, one of BNB’s biggest customers, hired Buttet to head a new “Haute Horlogerie” department to make complicated movements for the Hublot brand. Hublot chief Jean-Claude Biver told WatchTime he will hire 30 to 40 watchmakers from BNB. Biver said he is in the process of trying to buy all of BNB’s machinery. BNB machines and people will be relocated to Hublot’s new factory in Nyon, which opened last year. Prior to BNB’s collapse, but as a precautionary measure in its event, Hublot, which is owned by the LVMH luxury-goods group, had bought from it about $2 million of finished and unfinished movements so it would not be cut short.

Look for an in-depth report in WatchTime’s March/April issue.

BNB’s customers included Romain Jerome, Jacob & Co., DeWitt, Bell & Ross, and Concord