13 minute read
CARRY ON CARROUSEL
WORDS: ALEX DOAK
ULYSSE NARDIN HAS BEEN FREAKING OUT FOR 20 YEARS SOLID, WITH ITS RESTLESS MERRY-GO-ROUND OF FAROUT MICRO-TECH
The charismatic Rolf Schnyder (top) seen here dominating the boardroom after restoring the fortunes of the crumbling brand and (above) No.3 Rue de Jardin, the 19th-century building in Le Locle that remains the home of Ulysse Nardin today
“The Freak is still ahead of its time, and it will remain our ‘laboratory on the wrist’. It’s simply a freaky state of mind.”
For all of Switzerland’s deeply un-cool hyperbole, for once you can’t argue with Ulysse Nardin’s chief product officer, Jean-Christophe Sabatier. There is no overstating how restlessly innovative this take on the tourbillon’s rebel cousin, the carrousel, really is. The only tricky thing to weigh up is its influence, for as Sabatier notes, “It is a very specific and mechanically complicated product that cannot be counterfeited.”
As far removed from a 19th-century pocket watch as it might seem, this is bang on brand. Back in horology’s heady days of modern-era explosion (1844 to be precise – precise being the operative word) a precociously talented Monsieur Ulysse Nardin borrowed 725 francs from his parents to set up shop. Two years on, aged just 23, he was signing his own watches, becoming so successful that he employed a presumably proud (perhaps rather emasculated) father, while his sister Isaline was brought on to set the jewels. Initially, young Ulysse’s stock in trade was minute repeaters and pocket chronometers, however the second generation of Nardins made their name in the marine chronometer business, cementing the nautical roots that prevail in today’s brand, right down to that iconic anchor logo. The large ‘M.Gr.F.’ marine chronometer of 1903 was used or copied wholesale by navies in all quarters of the oceangoing world, up to and beyond WWII.
By 1980, the advent of quartz in the sixties, a failed rescue bid by American watchmaker Benrus, then the retirement or passing of every senior member of famille Nardin all conspired to reduce this once-proud company to a decrepit 19th-century building in Le Locle, housing two lonely watchmakers and one incredibly prestigious brand name.
Enter the late, great and irresistibly charismatic Rolf Schnyder (1935–2011). He’d already set up watch-part factories in Thailand and Malaysia when he bought Ulysse Nardin lock, stock and winding barrel. Other than giving No.3 Rue de Jardin a quick dust, his first move was bringing aboard a rising star of whom the young Ulysse would surely have approved: scientist, astronomer, horologist and all-round brainbox Ludwig Oeschlin, discovered by Schnyder restoring an astrolabe clock in the back of a Lucerne boutique.
Oechslin singlehandedly ushered in our post-QuartzCrisis era of the unexpected and covetable. First, a trio of astronomical masterpieces – 1985’s Astrolabium Galileo Galilei, 1989’s Planetarium Copernicus, and the Tellurium Johannes Kepler of 1992, named after Germany’s 17th-century genius of planetary motion. Secondly, another precocious talent who Oeschlin recognised in an instant come 1997.
Refreshingly, it was a woman: one Ms Carole Forestier, who would go on to head up complications at Cartier for 21 years before moving to TAG Heuer’s skunkworks last March. It was Forestier who planted the seed of what we now know as the Freak when she won Breguet’s one-off, 250th-anniversary prize with her ‘Karrusel’ prototype. She didn’t know it at the time, but it would go on to serve as a petri dish for nigh-on every advance in mechanical materials over the next two decades.
As Sabatier attests, “[The Freak] will continue to preserve the unique state-of-mind brought by Ludwig and Rolf at its launch.”
The almost relentless innovation at Ulysse Nardin is typified by their Freak next Oscillateur (top), which instead of using a balance wheel to eliminate poise error uses blades to keep the amplitude of the oscillator constant in any position
The new Freak X (top) has a more approachable price tag than the original and is available in a smaller 43 mm diameter case. Ludwig Oeschlin’s revolutionary ‘dual direct’ escapement (above) features two friction-free escape wheels etched from silicon for the very first time in watchmaking
“However,” adds chief industrial and supply chain officer, Lucas Humair, who took over from Forestier in 1999, “there was a calculation error in her project, which resulted in a power reserve of less than 10 hours. Ludwig took over and completely transformed it.”
More than that, Oeschlin rethought just about every tenet of wrist-born horology. Danish-born Bahne Bonniksen’s original 52.5-minute ‘carrousel’ concept of 1892 was upped to 60 minutes, so the entire rotating movement could double as a minute hand. Oeschlin wrapped the mainspring about the circumference of the dial, gearing it to indicate the hours as it uncoiled. To coil it up again (after seven days’ autonomy, no less) there is no winding crown; instead you twist the caseback, mirrored neatly by the dial-side bezel, which sets the time/carrousel itself.
As if that wasn’t enough, Oechslin’s launch model of 2001 nonchalantly threw in a ‘dual direct’ escapement, its two friction-free escape wheels photolithographically etched – for the very first time in watchmaking – from silicon. For watchnerds at least, this was a delicious irony, as Forestier’s flawed prizewinner of 1997 pipped to the post (some say unfairly) Derek Pratt’s Double Wheel Remontoir Tourbillon, which had finally perfected Abraham-Louis Breguet’s 200-year-old invention – beyond even the previous efforts of Pratt’s friend, Dr George Daniels.
Not only was Ulysse Nardin the first watch brand to use silicon – materials tech now found in £620 Tissots – but its success in the Freak led to a 2006 hook-up with with Swiss microengineering company Mimotec. Its collaborative ‘Sigatec’ now provides over 30 companies with silicon components. Then, along came diamond…
Or rather, ’DIAMonSIL’, in 2007. In this new species of Freak, following tentative and rather fragile experiments in solid synthetic diamond components, the silicon escapement parts were covered in a synthetic nanocrystalline diamond film, which bore the same hardness and consistency as pure diamond.
Come 2017, the Freak Innovision 2 introduced the world to ‘monobloc’ flexible tech, with a twitching, single-piece silicon escapement etched seemingly in the form of a Deception helmet, long before the likes of Zenith’s Defy Inventor. Then, in 2018, Ulysse Nardin made the Freak self-winding, thanks to a clever gearing system called Grinder, inspired by America’s Cup yachts’ pulley systems. Transplanted from the Innovision 2, essentially it lowers the winding system’s torque so that the energy of the slightest of movements can be captured and stored in the mainspring.
As of 2019, we’ve been living in an even-more remarkable era of Freak: a core ’X’ collection, now with a crown, but purchasable for just over £22,000 with all the freaky innovation you’d want under the bonnet: Grinder as standard, plus super-light silicon balance wheel with nickel flyweights and stabilising microblades. The top-end ‘NeXt’, meanwhile, took things higher still, with tri-stacked silicon wheels flexing at odds with each other, thus stabilising things better than ever.
“For the future, we will preserve the Freak’s DNA – which means a concept without a dial and hands,” says Jean-Christophe Sabatier. That sounds oversimplified, but what he really means is, other than a dial or hands, anything else is possible. Given what’s come before, you can believe him.
“The most important things in life are to love and to create.”
It’s not a surprising sentiment to hear from the devilishly handsome brains behind the collaborative horological studio of MB&F. With their timepieces ranging from bulldogs to eyes to the slightly phallic starship that is the HM09, commerciality obviously doesn’t come into it.
All of those pieces I just mentioned however come under the oddly shaped umbrella of Horological Machines. This year on the other hand marks ten years of the LM series, the closest thing the studio has to a classical timepiece. Funnily enough, it was also a series that, according to Max, was never meant to be.
“LM 1 was never supposed to be LM, there was no idea to create a new range, a new line, nothing. On HM04 I started what I call my balance wheel fetishism – which is completely legal –and I wanted to see the most beautiful parts of the movement.
“So I started drawing what looked like three tubes, one with the balance, one with the hours and minutes and one with the power reserve. Everything I came up with was absolutely god awful. So one day I just thought, let’s do something classical, a round watch. It made my lead designer – and best man at my wedding – walk out of the room. But, being a dictator at the time, I won.”
Of course, stepping so far away from what was at the time the identity of MB&F required a bit of guidance, ideally from someone well versed in the more classical side of haute horology. Fortunately there are few watchmakers more experienced in that field than the inimitable Kati Voutilainen. Unfortunately, after a quick meeting, it turned out that Kari was too busy to jump aboard the as-yet unnamed project.
“So just to get a bit of feedback,” explains Max, “I brought out the drawing we’d put together for some pointers. “You can do this,” he said, “you can do that, I’d do this with the bridges,” three or four minutes of sketches and ideas. Afterwards I asked him again if he was going to do it, he cracked up with a big smile and said “yes, this is a project I want to be on.” That was the beginning of LM.’
At the time it was a bit of a shock to the system for MB&F fans and fans of their breed of independent watchmaking. It was cool but classical, innovative yet entrenched in watchmaking past. It did however work as a kind of sister collection to the HMs.
Words: Sam Kessler
Man of Influence: MAX BUSSER
THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND MB&F TALKS THE GENESIS OF THE LM MACHINE AND HIS BIGGEST MISSTEP IN WATCHMAKING
MB&F have largely earned positive critical praise, but Busser (below) candidly describes the LM101 (left) as: “our biggest flop ever. It didn’t sell. Nobody wanted it”
As Max puts it, “The HMs and LMs come from two very different places, different sides of the brain. The HMs are a kind of psychotherapy for me, wild, creative sculptures. They sprout out of me and I don’t know where from. LMs on the other hand are incredibly structured, intellectual developments. LMs start with movements, HMs start with ideas.”
It’s easy to look at everything that MB&F has done and assume that somehow, Max has never made a misstep. There’s not a piece, be it HM, LM or table
clock that’s not garnered critical praise and clamouring collectors. That is, except for one piece: the LM101.
“LM101 was the first and last time I listened to my clients and my retailers. We’d done LM 1 and everyone loved it… but thought it was too big. Pateks in those days were 39mm watches. It wasn’t the way I thought but sometimes you need to create a product to prove people wrong.
“So we built it. It was what all the collectors wanted, what all the retailers wanted and when it came out… it was our biggest flop ever. It didn’t sell. Nobody wanted it.”
Then of course came Dubai Watch Week 2019. Like many brands exhibiting, MB&F decided that they needed to build a limited edition for the show and took a punt on a handful of 101s in palladium. They sold out in three weeks. Last year at Geneva Watch Days, they did the same again, this time in partnership with the maestros at Moser & Cie; all 60 pieces sold in four days.
“In short, I’m totally clueless as to what’s going to sell! So now we just create what we love and cross our fingers it works out.”
That’s probably a good attitude for a brand like MB&F. If you’re wondering if a star chariot-shaped clock being ridden by an alien will sell, there’s not a huge amount to compare it to. It’s not exactly a well-populated sub-genre of horology. Hell, not even Max really knows where he gets these ideas. Not that he has no inclination about where they came from.
“I don’t think I get inspiration from anything in particular, but I always bear in mind something I believe Coco Chanel said: ‘he who insists on his own creativity has no memory.’ At least I think it was Chanel. However creative and crazy we are, we are the fruit of everything we have seen and heard, it seeps into us without us knowing and we bring something out of that. I know that I internalise things, even if I can’t pinpoint them exactly.
“It’s why I make sure I take an hour every few days to just think. That’s what I want to tell the millions of people that don’t think they’re creative. Of course you are! You’ve just shut down that part of your brain and convinced yourself you’re not. Everyone is creative, they just need the space to be.”
Max Busser
Books to Bookmark
THE MB&F SUPREMO AND THINKER, MAX BUSSER SELECTS THE BOOKS THAT GIVE HIM PAUSE FOR THOUGHT
ART OF BREGUET
by George Daniels
The skills, innovations and sheer artistry of the greatest watchmaking of his age, as told by arguably the greatest of another, The Art of Breguet is one for the serious horologists among us, be they collector or watchmaker. The late, great George Daniels dives into the ways in which Abraham Louis Breguet impacted watchmaking, offering a detailed study accompanied by technical drawings and analysis to shed light on Breguet’s technical philosophies and mastery of the craft. Complete with a foreword by Emmanuel Breguet, this is, in short, the complete bible of historical Breguet watchmaking.
LONGITUDE
by Dava Sorbel
This true retelling of how one John Harrison solved arguably the greatest scientific problem of his age cuts through a good deal of the more esoteric aspects of the search for longitude, creating an easily digestible but no less impactful overview of a miraculous breakthrough. If you’re looking for treatise on physics and the minutiae of Harrison’s cutting-edge horology, this might not be what you’re after, but for the rest of us its an intriguing tale of how British inventiveness led to Britannia ruling the waves. For a time, at least.
OLD AUCTION CATALOGUES
“New auctions are only about sports Rolex, Nautilus, and other ‘premium’ products and there are virtually no great pieces of vintage watchmaking.” According to Max, that means if you want to see some truly inspiring timepieces, the best way to go about it is to dredge up old auction catalogues to have a look through. Most auctioneers keep theirs on file, though the most readily available digitally are those of Antiquorum, who have made their archive stretching back to 1988 accessible online. Otherwise, eBay is your friend.
