On December 25, 1969, Japanese watchmaker Seiko released the Astron. The watch retailed for 450,000 yen, the sticker price of a compact car at the time, and the first edition was limited to 100 pieces. It would have been cheap at twice that: The 18-karat gold timepiece represented the greatest advance in watchmaking since Christiaan Huygens invented the spring-driven balance wheel in 1675. The Astron had an electronic movement driven by a quartz crystal. Powered by a battery, it never gained or lost more than five seconds a month. A typical wind-up could drift that much in a single day.

The venerable Swiss watch industry had developed a quartz movement but hadn’t yet used it in a production model. That turned out to be a missed opportunity of epic proportions: Appetite for the Astron continued to grow, especially after prices dropped from the cost of a new car to the outlay for a tank of gas. Battery-powered quartz watches washed over the world like a temporal tidal wave. They dominate the market to this day. To survive, big Swiss companies such as Rolex and TAG Heuer bowed to the inevitable, mass-producing quartz movements like the Japanese and Americans. Employment in Swiss watch factories dropped by more than half. After five centuries of technological progress and artistic development, the era of the beautifully crafted mechanical watch seemed to be over. Silicon had won. “Nobody believed that anyone would be able to make a mechanical watch by hand in the future,” recalls Dominique Loiseau, who’d enrolled in watchmaking school months before the Astron was revealed. In the ’70s, Loiseau was one of the lucky few conventional watchmakers to land a good job. He made his living not by building new watches but as a master restorer of 18th-century rarities in the Chaux-de-Fonds watch and clock museum.

But now Loiseau is back to crafting, by hand, wristwatches that retail for $2.1 million apiece. Buyers are eager to snatch them up: There’s a long waiting list for his 1f4— named after a favorite opening gambit in chess—since he and the three workmen who constitute his horological studio finish only two specimens per year. The 1f4 is one of the most complicated watches ever conceived, the product of 15,000 hours of R&D and production. Eight hundred ninety-one parts—each hand-finished to a tolerance of one hundredth of a millimeter—mesh to measure and display everything from the phases of the moon to an interesting but inessential equation used to account for the discrepancy between mechanical time and the time kept by the sun. (The reference to chess is meant to evoke the mental game required to fit all those pieces together. In the initial conception, Loiseau didn’t use a computer—or even a pencil and paper.)

Which is not to say that the 1f4 is a work of traditional craftsmanship. On the contrary, it’s an extreme example of a new generation of insanely complicated mechanical watches. It’s a machine that could only have been engineered in the digital era, a celebration of precision fabrication in the age of CAD and in-silico modeling. “We all agree that there’s absolutely no practical reason to make a mechanical watch anymore,” says Maximilian Büsser, who helped plot the return of innovative mechanical watchmaking while working for diamond retailer Harry Winston at the turn of the millennium. “The only reasons to do it are as a tribute to tradition and as a work of mechanical art.” In other words, modern watchmakers are free to do whatever they damn well please, pushing the technological limits of horology, borrowing materials and micro-engineering techniques from the aerospace industry, and even attempting to outdo Huygens with entirely new timekeeping mechanisms.

Gears and springs are never going to compete with quartz for market share, let alone surpass quartz precision. But 44 years after the launch of the Astron, mechanical watchmaking is in the midst of its greatest renaissance since, well, the late Renaissance.

If the quartz revolution was led by Seiko in 1969, the mechanized counterrevolt was initiated by the exclusive Swiss brand Ulysse Nardin in 1983. Like a few other watchmaking houses (including Patek Philippe and Jaeger-LeCoultre), the august 160-year-old manufacture had never stopped crafting traditional mechanical watches in 18-karat gold, but the company’s new owner, Rolf Schnyder, was a serial entrepreneur who liked to take un-Swiss-like risks. To engender a spirit of radical innovation, he recruited a Vatican clock restorer trained in archaeology named Ludwig Oechslin. Over the next few years, he created a trio of complicated mechanical watches based on 18th-century astronomical clocks. Then, to give Oechslin an even greater challenge, Schnyder put him to work on a watch concept that everyone knew wouldn’t work on a wrist.

The concept was firmly grounded in tradition. In 1801, the great Swiss horologist Abraham-Louis Breguet (see “The Queen” ) patented an ingenious solution to one of the grand challenges of timekeeping: how to keep a watch ticking at a regular beat when you carry it around in your pocket. The problem originated with the oscillator—a little disk swinging back and forth on a spiral hairspring—invented in the 17th century by Huygens to replace the clock pendulum. The disk was called a balance wheel, and it worked well under ideal conditions, but gravity would affect its rate depending on the orientation of the watch. In a pocket the orientation was unpredictable and subject to constant shifting. Breguet’s solution was to mount the whole swinging mechanism on gears so that the oscillator would rotate inside the watch and faster and slower orientations would automatically average out. He called it a tourbillon—French for “whirlwind”—and all the finest 19th-century pocket watches had one. It made time portable.

For a brilliant young designer named Carole Forestier, the tourbillon suggested an entirely new way of displaying the hours and minutes: Why pivot the hands on fixed gearwork when you could show the time by making the whole watch movement rotate inside the case?

For Schnyder, the concept was a revelation, and he bought the patent for it from Forestier in 1998. But no one, not even Forestier herself, could make it work. For Oechslin, it was a nightmare. “The thinking behind the construction was wrong,” he recalls. If you tried to turn the whole movement in a case sized to fit on a wrist, there wasn’t enough power to drive the watch for more than a few hours. Nevertheless, Schnyder prevailed on Oechslin to build a watch based on Forestier’s idea. By the time Ulysse Nardin released the Freak in 2001, practically nothing was the same as in the initial concept. In fact, there was scant resemblance to anything ever worn on a wrist.

Schnyder (who died in 2011) put it best in an industry publication, when he said that the Freak “expressed three revolutions, an aesthetic one, a mechanical one and a material one.” To radically reconceive the display of time required that the movement be mounted on an enormous coiled mainspring, filling the entire back of the case, and that the oscillating mechanism be made ultra-efficient by replacing traditional metals with silicon parts grown in a lab.

The most challenging elements of this freakish timepiece were fabricated by the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, best known for pioneering extreme tech like artificial retinas. (It did already have some experience with the Swiss watch industry—developing microprocessors for quartz movements.) Making mechanical watch parts out of monocrystalline silicon was entirely new to the company, as were some of Oechslin’s ideas of making hairsprings out of polycrystalline diamond. Before the Freak, mechanical watchmaking was essentially a reactionary attempt to protect the Swiss heritage from the corruption of quartz. Thirty-two years after the arrival of the Astron, Schnyder and Oechslin showed that mechanical watchmaking could still be as inventive as electrical engineering.

The Ulysse Nardin Freak Diavolo. | Photo: Ricardo Cases Greubel Forsey's GMT in red gold. | Photo: Ricardo Cases Harry Winston's newest watch, the Opus 13. | Photo: Ricardo Cases Swiss maker De Bethune's DB25L. | Photo: Ricardo Cases MB&F'S Horological Machine Nº3. | Photo: Ricardo Cases The Double Tourbillon 30º Technique. | Photo: Ricardo Cases

But the freak might have remained just that—a detour on a mechanical side road leading nowhere— were it not for the arrival of an even more unlikely player. Harry Winston scarcely knew a balance wheel from a balance sheet in 1998, when the company recruited a 31-year-old manager from Jaeger-LeCoultre named Maximilian Büsser to turn around the moribund watch division. The first question Büsser asked was a good one: “Is there any reason for us to exist?” Harry Winston’s watches needed to be as extraordinary as its jewelry. “But we weren’t watchmakers. We had no history,” Büsser says. “That’s when I came up with the idea of matching rare diamonds with rare movements.” A fine idea. But where do you get these movements?

Two years later, while attending Baselworld, the annual industry convention, Büsser finally made his breakthrough. A friend named François-Paul Journe was struggling to establish an independent watch company and complained one evening that retailers were reluctant to invest in his handmade timepieces because he couldn’t trumpet his extensive resume—the work he’d done for famous watch brands over the previous decade. In the fiercely competitive luxury watch business, where corporate branding was increasingly important, subcontractors like Journe, who designed and constructed movements, were required to sign all-encompassing nondisclosure agreements. They were anonymous. “We were walking down the escalator,” Büsser says, “and I remember telling him, ‘We should create a product together, and we, Harry Winston, will tell the world everything you’ve done.’ ” Büsser dubbed their collaborative timepiece the Opus and by the time it was released, in 2001, he’d signed up two more independent watchmakers for the Opus 2 and 3.

The annual release of the Opus—produced in a limited edition of as few as 18 pieces—institutionalized the radicalism of the Freak without domesticating it. Because independent creators were selected for their maverick ideas, and their names were printed right on the watch, some of the most original thinkers in horology were embraced by the people who could most afford luxury and mechanical innovation.

They appreciated the intellectual challenges that the watchmakers took on and the fact that each watchmaker invented an entirely different kind of mechanism. Journe’s Opus, for example, applied a physical phenomenon discovered by Huygens but only incorporated into a portable timepiece by the legendary Breguet: the property of resonance. If two balance wheels are positioned close enough to one another, they will synchronize to beat in perfect opposition. As a result, if one is slightly slowed down by external interference, the other will speed up by exactly as much, compensating for the timing error.

Created with 3-D modeling software and roughed out on computer-operated milling machines, Journe’s Opus watch, a new interpretation of his Chronomètre à Résonance, was revolutionary, but its importance was difficult to explain. “At the press conference in 2001, just about everyone left saying, ‘Who cares?’ ” Büsser recalls. “It was only with the Opus 3 that people woke up to what was happening.”

The Opus 3 was as innovative as the Opus 1, but in an entirely different way. Independent watchmaker Vianney Halter built a digital watch entirely out of mechanical parts. The time and date are shown as large colored numerals through six steampunk portholes. The horological challenge was to make the numbers switch faster than the eye could see. Halter inscribed the digits onto 10 spring-loaded disks. The turning gearwork underneath gradually flexed the springs and regulated the release of each disk. Just how difficult this was to achieve became evident when Halter’s prototypes failed. He’d designed his watch movements entirely with pencil and paper. Only when the renowned watchmakers at Renaud & Papi rebuilt the watch from scratch—guided by computer simulations—did the movement run like clockwork.

Opus 5, released in 2005 by Felix Baumgartner of independent company Urwerk, was even more outrageous. The hour is indicated by an Arabic numeral inscribed on top of a specially designed minute hand. Over the course of an hour, the hand makes a half rotation, pointing to the numbers 0 through 60 written on one side of the dial like a speedometer register. After exactly 60 minutes, the hand folds up and another bearing the number of the new hour extends at zero. Made mostly of an anticorrosive alloy called Arcap P40—and microblasted for an ultramodern finish—it’s a wristwatch-cum-philosophical toy, in which the wearer’s relationship with time is subtly explored. The hours with which we rigidly structure our day are juxtaposed against the minutes that imperceptibly slip by.

Büsser argues that this sort of creativity—technical, aesthetic, and conceptual—can be achieved only by independent watchmakers such as those the Opus series helped foster. “They’re all following their gut,” he says. “They’re not following a marketing department that always wants to create what the client wants: the same thing they’ve already seen, but a little bit different.” He believes this strongly enough that in 2005 he quit Harry Winston to form his own independent company, MB&F, devoted exclusively to what he calls “three-dimensional mechanical art.” Working with a small group of indie collaborators, he has already produced six entirely different “horological machines” (the cases of which often have as many parts as a simple watch movement).

He joins a thriving ecosystem that he was largely responsible for nurturing. FP Journe, Vianney Halter, and Urwerk now regularly release new watches under their own names. As for Harry Winston, it just introduced the Opus 13.

The year after Max Büsser left Harry Winston, 2006, a young independent company called Greubel Forsey produced the Opus 6. The watch used an entirely new kind of tourbillon, representing the first of multiple breakthroughs in perhaps the most sustained tourbillon research project since Breguet died in 1823.

Boutique watchmakers Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey were perturbed by the tourbillon because it was a fundamental chronometric technology but had undergone the least successful adaptation for the wrist. Breguet’s tourbillon had to compensate for just one axis of rotation, since the pocketwatch was carried vertically, jostling only side to side in a gentleman’s vest. “The wristwatch lives a completely different life,” observes Forsey. There are two axes of rotation.

That suggested the need for a biaxial tourbillon, spinning in both orientations like a gyroscope, and one had actually been built—albeit inside a clock. As a technical matter, the mechanism would have been challenging to miniaturize, though by no means impossible with the help of computerized equipment. But a vertically mounted balance wheel would have to be minuscule to fit inside a wearable watch case, and reducing the diameter of a balance wheel decreases its inertia, making it less reliable the smaller it gets. Furthermore, the effect of gravity is most pronounced on a tourbillon in the vertical position. Greubel and Forsey realized that a gyroscope inside a wristwatch would actually undermine the timekeeping. They discovered, however, that mounting the tourbillon at an angle of less than 90 degrees solved both problems: A large-diameter balance wheel could fit in a reasonably thin watch case, and tilting it off the vertical plane avoided the most extreme gravitational effects while still correcting for a second axis of movement. The watchmakers found that a 30-degree angle was optimal, providing the maximum double-tourbillon effect in a wearable watch case. At Baselworld in 2004, Greubel and Forsey released their first wristwatch under their own signature, the Double Tourbillon 30º.

Two years later, the mechanism appeared in the Opus 6, but by then they’d moved on to other inventions. “We realized that inclining the balance-wheel oscillator system opened a whole new avenue of possibility,” Forsey says. One concept was to mount a single tourbillon at a 25-degree tilt but spin it really fast, at a rate of 24 seconds per rotation. (Most modern tourbillons turn once a minute. Breguet’s could take four or even six minutes to complete a single rotation.) Another idea was to achieve the complete gyroscopic effect by coupling two 30-degree double tourbillons with a spherical differential to average the two systems, so that each balance wheel compensated for any timing error produced by the other’s position.

Both of these watches are also now in production. “The watch industry has been able to benefit from the technology that almost destroyed it,” Forsey says. “The evolution of numerical control machines that came from electronics has given us a whole new set of tools with which we can machine parts that were almost unimaginable in the past.” The equipment also allows an independent like Greubel Forsey to concentrate expensive labor costs on procedures where an expert watchmaker’s hands can make a difference. After the automated processes are complete, each movement undergoes hundreds of hours of finishing.

Exposed beneath sapphire glass, the Greubel Forsey movements are miniature kinetic sculptures, yet the mechanical acrobatics have also proven their value technically. The Double Tourbillon 30º Technique won the 2011 International Chronometry Competition, earning 915 out of 1,000 points for precision timekeeping. The highest score for a mechanical wristwatch with no tourbillon was 764.

So is that it? Is the tourbillon, conceived more than two centuries ago by a craftsman with little scientific training, the ne plus ultra in horology? Guy Semon thinks not. “We are at the beginning of the story in mechanical watchmaking,” he says. All that’s required is that people stop thinking like watchmakers.

Semon trained as a test pilot in the French air force. After earning a PhD in physics and mathematics, he engineered a line of flight simulators and eventually started his own aviation company, ferrying executives in small jets. Sometimes he flew the planes himself. On one flight in 2004, his passenger was a watch designer named Jean-François Ruchonnet, who—much like Carole Forestier—had come up with a cool concept that nobody knew how to produce. The design was like a car engine: Instead of gears, the watch was driven by belts. Ruchonnet had sold the concept to TAG Heuer, a brand aimed at wealthy sportsmen. TAG produced mostly quartz watches, but the company’s executives surely noticed the burgeoning independent watchmaking phenomenon. They needed a prototype for Baselworld. Semon told Ruchonnet he could help.

TAG Heuer’s Monaco V4 took five more years to manufacture, during which time Semon was hired by TAG first as a consultant and then as director of research and development. “It was a totally new system without connection to an existing mechanism,” Semon explains. Since there was no precedent for driving a watch with belts, the company had to rent time on a supercomputer to optimize a mathematical model. Then there was the problem of manufacturing. Belts had to be as thin as human hair yet strong enough to withstand extreme tension; and to drive the watch, the belts had to apply just the right amount of friction. To create a material with all the right properties, Semon decided to injection-mold customized polymers. “To achieve new innovations in this industry is not a question of watchmaking but a question of physics,” says Semon, who considers himself fortunate for not having trained as a watchmaker. “For me, the V4 is not a watch. The V4 is a laboratory.”

Semon has now set a goal far more substantive than making a wristwatch mimic a race car. He’s building mechanical watches that dispense with Huygens’ balance and hairspring and edge closer to the standard 32,768-beats-per-second precision of quartz.

At first, the aim was simply to make a higher-precision chronograph. A standard balance wheel beats four times per second, which allows a typical stopwatch to measure time in eighth-of-a-second increments. Some balances oscillate at twice that rate, impelled by a shorter and stronger hairspring. By progressively shrinking and stiffening the spiral, Semon was able to build chronographs that could measure hundredth- and even thousandth-of-a-second intervals. The next increment was obvious—only it was blocked by the laws of physics. At more than 600 beats per second, the behavior of a hairspring goes haywire. “That’s why, to increase the frequency, I decided to invent a new mechanical regulator,” Semon says. “This is probably the trickiest challenge I’ve had at TAG Heuer. The hairspring has been around since 1675, and I am not Mr. Huygens. I am Guy Semon. Except I have computers.” With powerful digital simulations at his disposal, Semon realized that he could apply an 18th-century mathematical theory to 21st-century technology. The theory originated with Jean le Rond d’Alembert, who researched the behavior of strings—such as those of a harp—that vibrate at a set frequency regardless of how energetically they’re plucked. Semon built a chronograph that worked like a musical instrument. In place of the balance he installed a thin strip of metal that acted like a tine on a minuscule tuning fork. As the chronograph turned, the tine was repeatedly struck. The gear train could go only as fast as the tine vibrated in response.

The Mikrogirder (as the new chronograph is dubbed) has been honed to a two-thousandth-of-a-second precision. To perfect the timing of his creations, Semon modified a camera developed for munitions analysis, capable of taking 70,000 frames per second. The camera lets him observe exactly how all the moving parts interact. Yet there is another kind of interaction that he has yet to confront: the jostle of everyday use. A production model has not been released. “It is,” Semon says, simply “a demonstration of know-how.”

Owned by luxury conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, TAG Heuer is the world’s fourth-largest high-end watch brand. But in the race to build the mechanical oscillator of the future, it’s in competition with the likes of boutique Swiss watchmaker De Bethune, which has only a few dozen employees.

De Bethune was founded in 2002 by watchmaker Denis Flageollet—a former partner of François-Paul Journe—and collector David Zanetta. Since the beginning, they’ve been fixated on the balance and how to optimize performance through unorthodox combinations of materials such as platinum and silicon. Their watches are some of the most accurate ever built, but the duo is perennially dissatisfied. “A balance wheel is like a piston engine in an airplane,” Zanetta says. “If you want to get beyond a certain speed, you need to make a turbine.”

Zanetta’s talk of engines isn’t only metaphoric. Like any mechanical system, wristwatches suffer from friction. Running at high speed, a watch will swiftly break down, and even before the mechanism self-destructs, the friction will waste vast amounts of energy. Since a chronograph, or stopwatch, is used only intermittently—seldom running for more than a few minutes at a time—you can get away with running a piston engine at jet-engine speeds. But what if you want to enlist high-frequency, quartzlike precision for 24-hour-a-day timekeeping? Simply eliminate mechanical contact—by replacing the gearwork with magnetism.

Zanetta and Flageollet are building a wristwatch regulated by a magnetic rotor which is surrounded by magnets and an acoustic resonator. The magnets and spinning rotor cause the resonator to vibrate at a set frequency, and the vibrations control the speed with which the wheel spins. Completely independently of Guy Semon, and using an architecture entirely unlike the Mikrogirder, Zanetta and Flageollet have also called up the ghost of d’Alembert.

Zanetta reports that his Résonique prototypes are already running for up to 14 hours, oscillating at a “crazy speed” of more than 1,600 vibrations per second. But radical as the mechanism may be, De Bethune has made the even more maverick move of eschewing intellectual property protection. From TAG Heuer to Dominique Loiseau, the industry is obsessed with patents, and has been since Abraham-Louis Breguet began hoarding rights to his inventions in the 18th century. With the advent of his radical magnetic technology, Zanetta has decided to turn his back on that cramped tradition and instead give his idea away. “Every-body can have everything,” Zanetta says, “because at the end of the day the idea is the advancement of knowledge.” While the masses keep time on their iPhones, radical mechanical watchmaking offers a time capsule back to the age of discovery.

Contributor Jonathon Keats (jonathon_keats@yahoo .com) is the author of Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age.