The Tourbillon: Degrees Of Complication

The Watch That Is Pure Innovation

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Remove the back of even the simplest mechanical timepiece, and the mechanism you see inside looks impossibly complicated. This mechanism, known as the movement, is typically made up of 200 or more individual parts, most assembled manually in a workshop by someone with very steady hands. So, to understand what's really going on, we took a look at the six complications that represent the height of the horological craft.

The Complications

May 30th - The chronograph, which stops time.

May 31st - The power reserve, which tells you how long it will stay running.

June 1st - The repeater, which chimes the time.

June 2nd - The perpetual calendar, which never needs setting.

June 3rd - The moon phase, which tracks the lunar cycle.

Today - The tourbillon, which defies gravity in a quest for precision.

No discussion of watch complications is complete without the tourbillon, the king of complications. At over 200 years old, it is one of the oldest, and it has little relevance to the modern wristwatch. Yet this movement within a movement continues to bewitch horologists to this day. It is fitting that we end our Degrees of Complication series with a tribute to the one that started it all and sits undisputed above the rest.

All of the complications we have discussed in this series — the chronograph, the power reserve, the repeater, the perpetual calendar, and the moon phase — perform a useful function for the wearer, tracking elapsed time, chiming the hours and minutes or tracking lunar movements. A watch with a tourbillon complication does nothing but tell the time. So why is it so coveted by watch collectors and aspired to by watchmakers? Looking at this magnificent mechanism, even a novice would be enchanted. And that is a clue as to its magic.

A tourbillon (pronounced "TOUR-bee-yon") is a complication that provides greater precision in the timekeeping of a mechanical watch. There is no simpler way to explain it. To understand a tourbillon, you really need to look at one, and then you'd know why watchmaking prowess may have reached its peak when Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States and Napoleon was invading Italy. Let’s go back to this time and see where it all began.

Defying gravity

The tourbillon is an obsolete solution to an obsolete problem within an obsolete technology. At the time it was invented, of course, there was only the hand-wound pocket watch. The biggest challenge to watchmakers in the late 1700s was timekeeping. A good watch was one that kept time to within a minute or two a day. Lacking readily accessible time standards, it was the best a man could do to wind his watch daily and set it to the clock in the town square.

If you’ve seen a mechanical watch movement, you’ve probably noticed the inscription on one of its bridges that reads, "Adjusted to five positions," or something along those lines. Have you ever wondered what that means?

The bane of the mechanical watch is gravity. The force that keeps us rooted to the ground plays havoc on a watch’s escapement and balance assembly, the fragile components that oscillate thousands of times an hour and regulate the precise transmission of energy through the gear train that drives the watch hands.

We look at the genesis of the tourbillon next...