We’ve looked at the , and the , and even the . Now we turn our attention to the very best watches in the world. A tourbillon is an escapement housed in a rotating cage, which was invented by hundreds of years ago to counter the effects of gravity.
Since then, the problems of gravity have been otherwise mitigated in watches, but the challenge of creating, and the beauty of viewing, a troubillon continue to fascinate makers and collectors alike. Placing the tourbillon mechanicsm at the center of the watch movement, and thus the dial, is especially challenging, and doing so requires unique technical and design innovations. The central tenet of the central tourbillon is that there can be no central hands.
The pivots in the center of the dial are occupied by the , so although seconds can often be read off the tourbillon carriage, if it is a , there must be a creative solution to the problem of where to place the hour and minute hands. In most central tourbillons, the hands are mounted on disks that rotate around the cage, with tracks under the tourbillon cage or along the dial periphery. Another solution is to use the jumping hour plus retrograde minute scale combination, a potentially more legible solution since the hands on rotating disks tend to take the form of short arrowheads, which can sometimes be hard to read.
It makes you appreciate the efficacy of long central hour and minute hands on traditional watch dials, something we tend to take for granted. The central tourbill.