The Tourbillon: Degrees Of Complication

The Watch That Is Pure Innovation

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A mechanical watch is subject to accuracy fluctuations depending on the position in which the watch is kept. Leave your watch sitting flat on your dresser at night, and it might pick up a couple of seconds by morning. Leave the same watch lying on its side with the crown facing the ceiling the next night, and it might run a second or two slow. Lying flat, dial-side up, and it might be dead accurate. But in normal use, a wristwatch is put in hundreds of positions throughout the day as you move your arm. No matter how precise a watchmaker gets the watch to run sitting on his workbench in Switzerland, there’s no telling how it will run when you strap it on and go fry eggs, drive a car and type at a keyboard all day. Therefore, a good watch is adjusted for precision in more than one position, typically dial up, crown up, crown down, vertical, and dial down.

In the late 1700s, even the adjustment of a watch movement for the utmost precision wasn’t enough to combat the insidious power of gravity. The reason for this was that pocket watches spend the majority of their existence in a vertical position, suspended on a fob inside a man’s waistcoat pocket, only occasionally emerging to be referenced at the train platform or theater. With every swing of the balance wheel, gravity acts on the minutely weighted wheel pulling it down and counteracting the spring’s upward force.

The problem of gravity’s effect on a watch’s precision haunted watchmakers for years, until two days before Christmas in the year 1800, when a patent was applied for with the French Interior Ministry. The patent was for a curious device called a "tourbillon regulator," and the great modern era of the watch complication was born.

The whirlwind

The man who applied for the tourbillon patent was Abraham-Louis Breguet, referred to by many "the king of watchmakers and the watchmaker to kings." The fact that Breguet invented the tourbillon has a lot to do with why the complication is so revered. Though he was born in Switzerland, Breguet is most often spoken of in connection with French royalty. His first appointment was as an apprentice watchmaker at Versailles, and his renown spread from there. Breguet founded his eponymous company in 1775, and throughout his life, he was commissioned by a who’s who list of European aristocracy, including Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, Czar Alexander I, and King George III. In fact, the tourbillon first made its appearance in a carriage clock for Napoleon Bonaparte.

"Tourbillon" is a French word that means "whirlwind," and it is a fitting name for the complication. It works by continually moving the escapement and balance assembly so that it never rests in one position where it will be affected by gravity. The components are mounted in a circular cage that makes one revolution typically every minute. With the balance wheel swinging at upwards of 18,000 times per hour and the entire apparatus revolving around its axis, it is utterly mesmerizing to watch and does evoke a whirlwind.

While Breguet’s first tourbillon was in the movement of a 200-pound clock built for travel (also vertical in orientation), it ultimately made its way into pocketwatches, where it proved itself most useful due to its prevalence. Perhaps the earliest and most famous tourbillon watch is the No. 1176, built by Breguet for Count Stanislas Potocki, a Polish aristocrat, in 1809. Originally sold for 4,600 French francs, it fetched close to $750,000 when it came up for auction in the early '90s.

Next up: Who makes the best tourbillons?


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