Extreme Watches

The adjective "extreme" makes me smile. It reminds me of the idiots in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle who seemed to have only two adjectives in their working vocabulary: "so extreme" and "so not extreme." When they inflicted some torment on the undeserving Harold and Kumar they would laugh and say, "That was so extreme!" And when Harold and Kumar got a little well-justified revenge, they indignantly exclaimed,"This is so not extreme!"

Still, I don't know how describe these watches, as a group, other than to call them extreme.

I've already blogged about 2 of these watches, the Hublot MP-05, which runs for 50 days on one wind-up and is made to resemble a Ferrari engine,

and the Urwerk Atomic Master Clock or AMC,

which I'm sure is a very nice watch to begin with, accurate, I would guess, to well within a second or two per 24 hours, but which comes with a suitcase-sized atomic clock which sets it to a far, far greater degree of accuracy.

Some hand-wind Swiss watches with a power reserve of a mere 2 or 3 days require some muscle power and determination to wind them. I had wondered just how difficult it was to wind up the 50-day Hublot -- hand-wind only, no automatic winding -- until I found out recently that "hand wind' is not an entirely accurate term to describe this watch, because it comes with an electric implement which resembles a small power drill. The part corresponding to the drill bit fits into a whole like the one which a 19th-century watch had, into which a key was fitted which one turned to wind the watch. In the case of the 50-day Hublot, one pulls the trigger on the drill-like machine, and it winds the watch. I wonder whether Hublot also offers a manual option for macho nut cases with things to prove, who are determined to wind it the hard way. And I wonder just exactly how hard that hard way would be and how well I would do it, because clearly, I have issues.

Is it just me, or does the suitcase atomic clock for the Urwerk AMC look exactly like a suitcase nuclear bomb in every movie which has one? Did Urwerk do that on purpose, the sly devils? Speaking of needing to prove things, do jet-setting Urwerk customers actually carry the suitcase atomic clock everywhere they go,  getting wrestled to the ground and interrogated in airports and downtowns all over the world until the police and security figure out that that it's an atomic CLOCK and not an atomic BOMB? 

And when the cops and security personnel figure out what the suitcase-sized thing is, do they laugh and high-five the extreme-watch owner, or are they quite annoyed? Or is it a mix of both?

After the last Formula 1 season, Hublot was replaced as Ferrari's official watch partner by Richard Mille. Check out one of Richard's watches:

If you said: Wowzer. Me likey! I'm surprised that Ferrari likes something so extreme -- that's exactly what I said. Word for word.

But wait! There's more! There's something out there which is too out there for me! I admire what this guy is doing, but frankly, I don't want it on my wrist because it would give me motion sickness. Behold, Crazy Hours by Franck Muller:

See where the 1 is on the dial? See how you have to skip the 6, 11, 4 and 9 to get from the 1 to the 2? And then how you have to skip the 7, 12, 5, 10 to get from the 2 to the 3? You getting dizzy and nauseous yet? The minute and second hands go around and around on this watch just like on a normal watch, but the hour hand skips. That's too much for me, I'm out!

There are a lot of watch snobs who hate Hublot, and who hate Richard Mille even more. But they don't hate Urwerk, maybe because of who the ancestors of the creators of Urwerk were. I don't know how they feel about Franck Muller.

I also don't know how I would like any of these brands if I saw them close up, picked them up and felt them in my hands and put them on my wrist. So far I've only seen photos and video, and by now I know that photos and video just aren't the same as being there. 

A lot of you may have seen video of Urwerk without realizing it: Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, wore an Urwerk in Spiderman: Homecoming. Not the AMC shown above. The UR-110.

Hublots and the People Who Hate Them

I'm still really new at being a watch fancier. But I have learned one thing: It's impossible, at least for me, to really get a sense of how a watch looks just from photographs of it, no matter how numerous and high-definition and from how many different angles the photographs may be. Photographs are not the same as having the watch in front of you, and looking at a watch in front of you is not the same as holding it, and I'm poor -- although I was able purchase a Seiko 5 --

(there are many like it, but that one is mine) -- and I imagine, although I have not tested this theory, that if I constantly went around to high-end jewelers and asked to be allowed to touch the high-end stuff, and never bought anything, that it might lead to my becoming persona non grata in those stores. I don't know. Might depend on the store.

A lot of people really despise Hublot. Which would mean, if I wore one, that judgmental douchebags would see the Hublot on my wrist and avoid me, sparing me the trouble of having to avoid them. One of the many reasons why I want an MP-05. I love to read the Watch Snob, but, unfortunately, he actually is a snob, and not just about watches, and he hates Hublots, which, as I strongly suspect, has to do not only with the watches themselves, but also with the sort of people who wear Hublots, whom the Watch Snob and his inbred acquaintances would refer to (in private, of course. Amongst themselves) as not our sort of people, and my God, snobbery is tiresome.

This is an MP-05,

a watch made by Hublot "in partnership with Ferrari." I still haven't figured out what exactly the nature of this partnership is. I'm sure that it consists almost entirely of one company giving money to the other, but I've no idea whether Hublot gives money to Ferrari or the other way around. There have been many partnerships between watchmakers and car makers, and I've found almost all of them to be very silly. They say again and again that the design of this watch in "inspired by" the design of that car or that the design othis car is "inspired by" the design of that watch, and almost always I find it all very silly, but in this case, the design of the MP-05 actually and undeniably is inspired by the design of a Ferrari V-12 engine:

I happen to think the watch looks really cool.

You know what? I have to pause now, and remember where I came in, and rephrase what I just said: I think that photos of the watch look really cool. I haven't actually seen a MP-05 yet, just pictures of them. I suppose it's possible that if I held one in my hands, I might be appalled. I might suddenly understand perfectly well why all of those people despise Hublots.

I might become one of those people. I might even suddenly despise people who wear Hublots, if not instantly upon seeing the watch itself, then upon meeting 10 Hublot owners and sensing undeniable trends in them and what they do. Who knows? Not me.

However, in the meantime, judging only from photos and realizing the limitations of that evidence, I think that the Hublot MP-05 look really cool. And besides its looks: you wind it once and it runs for 50 days. It's hard for me to imagine how even the most snobbish Hublot-hater could not find that cool, at least deep down in secret, even if he or she never admitted it. Small as a normal watch, but runs for 50 days. That's sort of like a car which you could very comfortably drive to the supermarket and back, but which can also go 500mph.

Speaking of cars, and imagining that you'd like things without having seen them or having other crucial bits of information about them: when the Bugatti automobile brand was re-introduced in the 21st century, at first, just reading about them and looking pictures of them, I was certain that I would love having one. Then, late in 2004, around the time when the first 21st-century model, the Veyron, went on sale to the public, I actually saw one in a shopping mall in Berlin. And it was so low to the ground, and I am so tall, that I found it just about impossible to believe that I could sit comfortably inside of one. (Right next to the Bugatti was a Bentley which looked much more like my sort of thing.)

Then, over the years, I learned more things which made the Veyron even less attractive to me: such as that it got 7mpg when driven gently. Such as that the tires had be replaced every 1000 miles if driven gently, and every 62.5 miles (15 minutes) if driven at 250mph. And that 4 new tires cost $30,000.

So: the previous 5 paragraphs all by way of saying that I think it's possible that I would hate Hublots if I knew more about them. Still, with what I know right now, Hublots look really cool and Hublot haters look like hateful people, often with extremely severe cases of stick-up-the-butt. The way it looks to me now is that Hublot is adventurous, and that people who only like watches which look like this --

-- are incredibly boring.

Not that I would necessarily find that particular watch to be boring, if I saw it in person and held it and put it on my wrist and wore it for a month, because I had become a well-known and respected writer on the subject of watches, so that watch manufacturers loaned me new watches for a month at a time just on the hope that I would write about them.

But I am fairly certain that I would still strongly object to the notion that ALL watches should look more or less like that. Which, I'm afraid, is not very far from the position taken by the Watch Snob and many other watch snobs. I still like the Watch Snob's writing very much. I'm going to decide for myself what I like and don't like, that's all.

Power Reserve Indicators

As with some other posts on this blog, this one may contain no information which would be new to specialists in its subject -- wristwatches, in this case -- and laypersons might ordinarily have little interest at all in the subject. Most of my posts are aimed at laypeople, and often they attempt to awaken an interest in them for something to which they'd previously barely given a thought.

On a wristwatch, a power-reserve indicator is a display on the face of the watch which shows how much longer the watch will run if it left untouched -- left unworn in the case of most contemporary high-end watches, which are automatic watches, also known as self-winding watches: they are wound by the ordinary movement of the wearer's wrist.

Or, in the case of obsessive-compulsive wearers such as myself -- I have an automatic watch: at a yard sale in 2004 I bought an automatic Timex built in 1979 for $2 -- by the unnecessarily often and frenetic shaking of the watches because we're irrationally worried that they'll run down. I think most automatic watches, including my Timex, can be wound like old-fashioned manually-winding watches, but when I wind the watch manually, it doesn't seem to stop winding when it's wound all the way, and also I'm worried that the crown -- the thing you turn to wind a watch -- may be damaged, and winding may make it worse. That, too, may well be a completely irrational worry, and yet here we are.

Maybe the power-reserve indicator was created partly with obsessive-compulsives in mind. This watch by Orient

has a maximum power reserve of 40 hours. As the watch unwinds, the hand on the dial at the bottom of the watch's face goes from right to left. In the photo, the power reserve dial is indicating that this watch will run for another 25 hours if left untouched.

40 hours is about the average maximum power reserve of a mechanical watch. If a luxury watch has a power reserve of 60 hours, the manufacturer may brag about that in a short description of the watch.

There has been a competition among some luxury watch makers to create a watch with the longest power reserve. The longest power reserve known to me is possessed by this watch by Hublot,

the Hublot Masterpiece MP-05, a manual wind-up watch, not an automatic, which can run for 50 days between windings. I'm not entirely sure what all the numbers on the face of the watch mean, but I'm guessing that the number in the upper left indicate that the watch has 40 days to go before it needs winding, and that the numbers in the upper right and at the bottom indicate that it is 9:11:30 AM or PM on the 10th of May. I could be wrong, but I'm sure it comes with an owner's manual.

When my current obsession with mechanical watches began about 3 years ago, this was the sort of watch I was not interested in. Back then, I wanted the simplest possible display: something much more like this watch by A Lange & Soehne,

the A Lange & Soehne Lange 31, also a manual wind-up, not an automatic, which happens to have an exceptional 31-day power reserve, 2nd-logest I've heard about. The dial near the 3 o'clock position in the photo shows that the watch has a little more than half of those 31 days left on its mainspring.

3 years ago, I would have liked that this A Lange & Soehne watch is made of platinum -- I still do, and I'm disappointed that the the Hublot pictured about is made of titanium -- but I would have disliked that it is a wristwatch rather than a pocket watch, and that it doesn't have bold Arabic numerals 1 through 12 marking the hours. 3 years ago, with very few exceptions such a preference for a second hand which moves in the same circle as the hour and minute hand, the more a watch's design departed from that of a 100-year-old railroad watch, the more I disliked it. So I would've detested the Hublot. However, in the past 3 years I've looked at lots and lots of pictures of extremely expensive watches, and read a fair amount about them, and gotten more and more used to, and even appreciative of, unconventional designs. Overall, I still like something like the Lange better than the Hublot, and if I could find a brand-new solid-platinum pocket watch that ran as well as a brand-new high-end wristwatch, I would like that best of all -- just letting the world's finest watchmakers know, in case they've been reading my blog, and planning to present me with a magnificent watch in appreciation of my services to the expensive-watch industry: pocket watch, platinum, size 16 or 18, as heavy as possible, cutting-edge accuracy and precision, long power reserve, and a power reserve indicator would be very nice, otherwise they don't need to go nuts with the complications or clutter up the face -- but if I were a billionaire who'd allotted several million dollars to his annual watch budget, not only would I own something like that $150,000 platinum Lange, I'd also consider shelling out $300,000 for that Hublot. (I'm not saying that either of those watches would actually spend more time on my wrist than in one of my pockets.) I don't hate the Hublot like I would have 3 years ago. I like the 50-day power reserve very much, not because I think that such a long reserve is at all necessary -- watches are no longer necessary -- but in a because-it's-there spirit. The Hublot watch is made as a tribute to Ferrari, and if I'm looking at it right, the part running from the top to the bottom down the middle of the face, besides being extremely functional, is made to look like a Formula 1 Ferrari motor.

I know more about watches than I did 3 years ago. The more you know about manufactured items the more you tend to like them, I think, all other things being equal. Some of my fellow Leftists will be appalled by this post, and consider these watches to epitomize much of what is wrong with the world, and I understand that reaction. I just disagree with it.

PS, 10 February 2017: Over at the Time Transformed website, Ambrose Lancaster has written a nice article about watches with impressive power reserves. The longest power reserve on his list is the Hublot Ferrari with 50 days, same as in this post. But he includes a few timepieces I hadn't heard of. And he writes well, and his article contains a lot of interesting information.