Pilgrim's Progress

Twenty years ago, when my grandfather passed away, I was handed over his closest possession – a Omega manual wind mechanical wristwatch. I was in third standard and could hardly understand the difference between this one and the Mickey Mouse Casio quartz on my wrist. It was not until 24 hours later when I realised my grandfather’s watch has stopped. I panicked thinking that I must have done something to it and summoned the courage to tell my father about it. He told me that the watch is fine but it is my responsibility now to give it life every morning by winding it, just the way grandfather used to. After three complete rotations of the crown I suddenly felt the watch gaining life with a jolt. It felt amazing. I took off my Mickey from the wrist and strapped on my first mechanical watch after my father added an extra hole to the strap. My love affair with mechanical watches started from that day.

Once you wear mechanical watches you can’t wear quartz any more, the owner of a luxury retail watch chain confessed (He did not want to be quoted as he was also an authorised dealer of quartz collections from brands like Omega and Longines). You couldn’t agree more.

“The trend towards self-winding automatic watches from quartz has shifted radically from 2006. In men’s watches now automatics occupy 80 per cent of the market in India. However, in women’s watches quartz still dominates with 70 per cent share,” said Sandeep Kapoor, promoter of Kapoor Watch Company. The awareness on automatics has increased as the Swiss watchmakers are pushing for it. They are focusing on hand-crafted, hand-assembled, specialty movements and also on the longer life of automatics vis-a-vis quartz watches, Kapoor added. 

In the luxury Swiss watch market, watches are priced highly for two reasons, besides the brand value. One, they are made of gold (white, yellow or rose) or platinum and they are studded with diamonds and other precious stones like rubies, so it is the price of these jewels and the gold or platinum that make the watch costly along with its brand value. The other reason is for the complications that are involved in the movements. It is the man-hours that go behind making every watch make it costly.

No two handcrafted watches are alike as they are made separately and painstakingly manually by craftsmen who are keeping the over 400-year-old tradition alive. How every wheel is balanced with precision, how every ruby is placed with perfection so as to minimise the friction between the wheels ensuring that the watch does not lose more time than calculated.

To make transition from self-winding to the first automatic, it took me 15 years. And over the past five years, it has been an amazing journey of collecting watches with interesting mechanism such as retrograde. It has made me poorer financially, but definitely richer as a collector and explorer of the world of fine watchmaking.

“It is the human mind that is attracted to complications or complicated mechanisms, it challenges the brain, just like a puzzle. The amazing thing about these complications that strive to make a mechanical watch, which by definition has to have imperfection, precise,” said Nicolas Baretzki, international director of Jaeger leCoulte.

A Satyajit Ray story about a Perigal repeater shows the attachment that true watch aficionados have for their timepiece. The owner, Thomas Godwin, had requested it to be buried with him in his grave.

“Minute repeaters were invented because in king’s court it was not courteous to look at your pocketwatch. So with a repeater, if you press the crown the sound will tell you what is the minute position,” Renaud Pretet, brand director of Jaeger le Coulte told me. Swiss watchmakers are still keeping the tradition of making repeaters alive, they are Patek Phillipe, Jaeger le Coulte and Jaquet Droz.

But the complication that is still most revered in Swiss watch craftsmanship is a tourbillon. A tourbillon is an addition to the mechanics of a watch escapement in horology. Developed around 1795 by the French-Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet from an earlier idea by the English chronometer maker John Arnold a tourbillon aims to counter the effects of gravity by mounting the escapement and balance wheel in a rotating cage, to negate the effect of gravity when the timepiece (and thus the escapement) is rotated.

“Mr Breguet made it because pocket watches were held in upright position in the pocket and not in the horizontal position where the balances should ideally be and so the watches lost time due to gravity,” a boutique manager with Johnson Watch Company said.

And so companies like Breguet, Jaeger-leCoulte, Harry Winston and Cartier produced Master and Grandmaster tourbillions. Cartier managing director Louis Ferla said, “A modification in movement of a tourbillon takes 4-5 years to develop at Cartier.” Rotonde de Cartier single push-piece tourbillion sapphire skeleton is still the most sought after piece from Cartier stable.

In 2004, Jaeger-leCoulte created the gyrotourbillon which was more suitable for wrist watches and they see more movement than pocket watches. It is a two-axis, three dimension movement that compensates for the effect of gravity.

Mahatma Gandhi used a Zenith pocketwatch. But he did not keep it in his pocket and it used to hang from his loin cloth. Such a watch would have lost more time as the impact of gravity slowing it down was stronger on it that a watch resting in the pocket.

The jewel that is used in tourbillon is ruby. On an average, companies like Jaeger-leCoultre and Cartier use 17-25 rubies in a tourbillom mechanism. Rubies give more precision and accuracy to these watches. Their very small size and weight, low and predictable friction, including good temperature stability, and the ability to operate without lubrication and in corrosive environments make them crucial in watchmaking. The other jewels that are used in other mechanical watches are diamond, sapphire and garnet.

It takes years of precision to know exactly where to place a jewel — cap, pivot or impulse for balance or for escape or for centre wheel.

No wonder that a tourbillon price range starts from around Rs 50 lakhs and goes up to over Rs 2 crore. Is it the costliest watch? No. It is very difficult to identify the costliest piece as it is so much a closed-door affair with special previews or appointments for select clients with every luxury watchmaker that we can never tell with certainty what is the price or model or client. For example, if you want to take a peek at Opus collection or for that matter a Histoirie de Tourbillon, you would need to seek an appointment and depending on its availability a preview for the buyer can be arranged at the Harry Winston boutique in Delhi, said its manager. However, she refused to share the number of Opus or tourbillon she sells but just said “it is encouraging”. Harry Winston’s tourbillon range starts at over Rs 80 lakhs and goes up till around Rs 3 crore. 

Unlike Harry Winston, some watchmakers are not very happy with the Indian market. “The tourbillon market is not growing in India. Price is a deterrent,” Kapoor said. 

Sebastien Cretegny, international sales manager of Frederique Constant, which recently launched FC-9 980EGF4H9 tourbillon in India, told my office mate Abhinav Kaul, “Quite frankly we did not sell any tourbillon in India so far.”

Jaeger-leCoulte makes 15 gyrotourbillons a year, of which it manages to sell two in India.

“Consumers who are attracted by that kind of pieces in India are usually corporate professionals who have travelled the world and are in their mid 40-50s,” said Cretegny.

But retailers agree that even these professionals prefer to buy these watches abroad as they are frequent travellers and it turns out to be cheaper buying it abroad, thanks to the high customs duty and strengthening Swiss franc against rupee. They usually counter this by providing discounts to these valued clients and the discounts that are negotiated behind closed doors in private chambers of retailers.

Yes, it is true that there aren’t many Thomas Godwins around who would take it to their grave. But with increased awareness about what makes watches priceless and what it takes to keep mechanisms and complications that are centuries old alive more aficionados will join in.

In this pilgrimage, the next stop is tourbillon and being a part of the 400-year-old tradition of precision.