Well, we’re back from the 23rd edition of the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, which is held annually in January in Geneva for the purpose of introducing, to a world audience, the latest and greatest from the brands (and brands friendly with) the Richemont Group, the luxury group powerhouse with the single largest stable of luxury watch brands in the world. Brands that aren’t group members are few but notable, including ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive companies like Greubel Forsey and Richard Mille, and,carbon fabric for high temperature furnace and friction components. in the last few years, Ralph Lauren as well. Ralph Lauren’s first fine watchmaking collections were clear signs that he meant to do it right –though naysayers expected perfunctory, fashion-oriented timepieces that put appearances over content,Directory of knives supplier wholesale, kitchen knives manufacturers and kitchen knives suppliers. we were very pleasantly surprised by the coherence, clarity of design, and quality of Ralph Lauren’s partners –movements,kitchen gadgets seem to be one of the most abundant kinds of in particular, were sourced from impeccable Richemont Group manufacture powerhouses, including IWC,Shop for China 4x4 Accessories wholesalers at Target. Find auto interior accessories. Jaeger LeCoultre, and Piaget.
Now, the tourbillon itself is something of a conundrum these days. Originally patented by its inventor, the Swiss-born watchmaker Abraham L. Breguet (who worked in France for much of his life but appears to have finalized his invention while in Geneva, on the run from the Committee For Public Safety, during the Terror) it’s basically a rotating platform, or carriage, on which the parts of a watch that actually keep time –the escapement, balance, and spiral balance spring –are mounted. Usually the entire kit ‘n’ kaboodle rotates once per minute, though faster and slower periods of rotation have been tried over the centuries since Breguet was granted his patent in 1801.
The reason for going to all this trouble is simple –a watch will run at slightly different rates depending on how it’s oriented with respect to the force of gravity. For instance, it will tend to run a bit slower when sitting, dial up, on a table, than when held vertically. To complicate matters, in each of the possible four vertical positions –winding crown up, down, right, or left –it will run slightly faster or slower. Now with any luck, the errors will more or less cancel each other out, but Breguet was famously obsessed with accuracy (this at a time when a watch did well to gain or lose a few minutes a day; his watches were often much better than that) and wanted to leave nothing to chance.
Hence the tourbillon. In rotating constantly through all possible vertical positions, it creates a single average error for all vertical positions. You then just adjust the horizontal positions to match, and you should –theoretically –have a watch that keeps perfect time, or close to it.
That’s the theory, anyway. The reality is that a tourbillon is much, much more complicated to make than an ordinary watch, and for it to deliver on its promise,Following these easy measures will undoubtedly enhance your BUS A/C SWITCH. it has to be made and adjusted extremely precisely. For that reason, few watchmakers bothered with them after Breguet’s death –they were mostly made as tour-de-force demonstrations of skill, and up until the last 20 or so years –when the renaissance of interest in mechanical watches sparked an explosion of tourbillon designs –fewer than a thousand were made, and almost none of them for wristwatches.
This is all by way of saying that the tourbillon today still carries an aura of exclusivity, and sends a message of high watchmaking skill. It’s a provocative thing for Ralph Lauren to have made, to put it mildly –although it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Lauren, a watch collector himself, and a man notoriously interested in beautiful machines (his car collection is one probably anyone reading this is aware of, and with pangs of envy too) would want such a thoroughbred horse in his stable.
No comments:
Post a Comment