Feature: 5 Insane Watches You Won’t Believe Exist
If you thought a watch had a couple of hands and battery, you’re in for a shock bigger than that time I tripped at the toaster factory whilst carrying a fork. These are five of the most insane watches you’ll ever see. The last one’s just out of this world.
Richard Mille Tourbillon Bubba Watson RM 038
Before I say another word about the Richard Mille Tourbillon Bubba Watson RM 038, here’s the first thing you need to know about it. It’s a million-dollar watch. It’s one of just 38 pieces made with the blessing of golfing powerhouse Bubba Watson. When all the other watch manufacturers told Bubba he’d break their watches, Richard Mille not only took on the challenge, they went for a hole in one. Sorry.
The RM 038 is made from the same material as a Formula 1 car’s wheels, to make sure it’s lightweight and very strong. It would have been easy to make a tough watch by making it solid and heavy, but that’s not exactly what a pro golfer needs when they’re launching a ball at 200mph. The magnesium is 50% lighter than already very light titanium, but that’s only the start.
The biggest problem a mechanical watch has when it comes to shock resistance is the fact it’s made of a lot of very delicate pieces. Accurate timekeeping is only possibly with micron-level precision, and micron-level precision doesn’t like high g-forces. So, Richard Mille suspended the delicate movement from shock absorbers around the case to absorb the impact.
It’s so effective that Richard Mille decided to show off and upgrade the escapement from a normal setup to a tourbillon, an extremely complicated and delicate system that rotates the entire escapement in a cage to counter the effects of gravity. It’s a device made only by the best watchmakers in the world, and never in a watch used to play golf. It’s like trying to thread a needle during a bungee jump.
MB&F HM9 Sapphire Vision
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson made a watch that cost half a million dollars, well, it would probably end up something like this. This is the MB&F HM9 Sapphire Vision edition, and it’s just about as insane as you could ever hope.
Before we get onto the craziness going on inside, first let’s look at the outside. This is the second version of the watch, with the first getting a more ordinary—sorry, less insane—metal case. This one gets a case made almost entirely out of sapphire, and yes, that’s sapphire as in the gemstone.
It takes 350 hours to make the fully transparent sapphire case of this HM9, with sapphire only second to diamond as the hardest natural substance in the world. The end result is a perfectly clear exoskeleton for the delicate movement inside.
The HM9 isn’t read like an ordinary watch. The dial itself is as you’d expect, with a hand for the hours and a hand for the minutes, but the position is what takes you by surprise. It’s forward mounted so you don’t have to take your hands off the steering wheel to read it, as it’s already pointed at you.
Drive comes from not one but two escapements, conjoined in the centre by a mechanical differential. The idea is that the average accuracy of two escapements is always better than one, and so for extra precision the HM9 blends two together. The whole process is very much on show thanks to the sapphire case, looking every bit the $500,000 asking price. It’s basically the world’s most expensive Kinder Egg.
Niwa Lunokhod
Not all insane watches have to cost a fortune however, as the Niwa Lunokhod demonstrates at just $380. Despite looking like the inside of C-3PO, it is actually a timekeeper, although reading the time on it takes a bit more practice than you might expect.
There are two rows of vacuum fluorescent display tubes, each corresponding to a different function. The first takes care of the tens and the second the ones. So, think about the time as a twenty-four-hour clock. For the hour it’ll be zero, one or two for the first digit and zero through nine for the second. The two rows display that number first.
Then for the minutes, the first row will read zero through five and the second zero through nine. The seconds are the same. The big blue tube on the right tells you if you need to charge the battery, glowing bright until the charge gets low enough.
Even the way this watch is set is insane. Most watches use a crown to control the basic setting functions of the time, but this watch doesn’t have one. Instead, it comes with a magnet on a stick that can be used to cycle through the various modes to set the watch as you like it—because of course it does.
Kopf Watch
But if you’ve been thinking that none of these watches are quite robot-y enough for you, then do not fear, because I’ve got something suitably bananas right here. This is the Kopf Watch, brainchild of lunatic watchmaker German Polosin, and it’s as much a robot as you could ever want.
Polosin, an accomplished watchmaker, thought it would be fun to make a cheap, quartz robot watch just as a little side hobby, but being a watchmaker, he absolutely took the whole project far too seriously and ended up with a watch that’s one computer chip away from taking over the world.
Thankfully, this one ended up mechanically powered, and so it’ll stick to time-telling duties for now. In theory, it’s a fairly straightforward watch—that is, until Polosin made it very un-straightforward. It has a crown, for example, to wind and set it, but it appears to be missing. That’s because it’s been set into the robot’s teeth, right in the centre. Hours and minutes no longer share a common dial, each relegated to a separate eye socket.
Night-time viewing comes courtesy of small glass vials of radioactive material that glow softly, including one larger one hidden in the robot’s mouth. Speaking of the mouth, this incredibly complex eight-piece case is hinged at the jaw to make for a surprisingly comfortable fit. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the entire watch is just how well-made it is. Polosin just couldn’t help himself.
Jacob & Co. Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon
If you know even a little bit about cars, you’ll know the 300mph, 1,500bhp Bugatti Chiron is the absolute daddy. And if you can afford the $3.3m price tag, then chances are you’ll want a suitably insane watch to match. Enter Jacob & Co. and the equally nutbar $300,000 Bugatti Chiron watch.
Jacob & Co. could have quite easily made a normal watch, smothered it in diamonds and called it a day, but that really wouldn’t have been much fun. So, instead, they chose to make a watch that’s as crazy as the car itself. There’s proper coilover suspension in each corner, and some spinning turbos too, all as per the mighty road car. There’s even a full blown tourbillon complication doing duty upfront as a radiator fan if you can believe it.
The exterior gets the same treatment, with the nose of the watch sporting the famous horseshoe grill and the sides the C-shape emblem of the Chiron’s air intakes. It all sounds pretty crazy as it is, but with the Jacob & Co. Chiron, we’re only just getting started, because deep in the middle of the watch is an engine.
I don’t mean that like the watch’s movement is it’s engine—it’s got a literal engine. There are sixteen pistons—yep, just like the Chiron—and they actually work, pumping up and down at the push of a button. Jacob & Co. have even fashioned the block out of solid sapphire so you can see every single detail. And if you really want to go to town, you can get the entire thing made out of sapphire. That’ll cost you $1.5m, almost half the cost of the car itself.
Five utterly insane watches. Which was your favourite?
