“It’s not a pocket watch,” Felix Baumgartner, Urwerk‘s co-founder and chief watchmaker, emphasized to me when he first explained the UR-1001 back in 2011 when it launched. “It is a ‘Zeit Device’,” he said. “Zeit Device” is a fanciful German construct for “time device.”

Six thousand years ago in the Sumerian city of Ur, shadows cast by obelisks revealed the passing of time thanks to the the course of the sun across the sky.

Two thousand years ago, astronomers in ancient Greece used the Antikythera mechanism to calculate the positions of the sun, moon and planets in the heavens.

In the eighteenth century, John Harrison’s H4 marine chronometer enabled safe and accurate navigation by sea.

In the twenty-first century, amidst thousands of time-telling devices now found everywhere in the world, Urwerk offers its own type of epoch-defining time-measuring instrument: the UR-1001 “Zeit Device.”

Faster, faster faster: t i m e t o s l o w d o w n

If there is one thing that defines the twenty-first century, it is its incredible pace. Time fleets and flies; we never have enough of it. Our timepieces reflect this by measuring ever-shorter intervals. The first clocks only displayed hours, then the minutes were added, and now seconds are ubiquitous. There are even mechanical chronographs now able to measure intervals as small as 1/1ooth of a second!

There are a few clocks and watches that take a longer view, notably the Long Now clock and Andreas Strehler’s Sauterelle à Lune Perpétuelle. But rarely do timepieces do justice to a universe measured in billions of years – as a true “Zeit Device” should.

The UR-1001, however, is a true Zeit Device, measuring and quantifying the era in its entirety from a solitary second to an astronomical millennia. The UR-1001 marks the passage of time in seconds, minutes, hours, day/night, date, month, years, 100 years, and even a monumental 1,000 years!

This black version is the UR-1001 AlTin (Aluminium Titanium Nitride), whose coating comprises a tough industrial surface treatment normally used on machine cutters and drill bits to reduce wear.

The Zeit Device wasn’t just developed by Urwerk, the brand also produced the majority of its components. Dials, springs, satellites, carrousels, and a retrograde spiral spring were all manufactured in-house, as were most of the components needed to assemble the Zeit Device’s complications and indications.