Feature: Insane hyperwatches you won't believe exist

There are watches, and then there’s these, some of the craziest hyperwatches ever made, all in one place. With a big thanks to Art In Time for letting us shoot these crazy timepieces.

Ressence Type 1 Slim

Everyone thought telling the time on an analogue watch was all sorted out—that is until Ressence came along with a method that just makes no sense until you see it. Fusing the hands with the dial may seem like a recipe for disaster, but by using a series of very complex gears all aligned in a three-dimensional, spherical pattern, it actually makes total sense!

To fit in this gear mechanism, known as the Ressence Orbital Convex System, or ROCS, rather than laying the gears themselves flat alongside each other, they actually mesh in the shape of a sphere, exactly mirroring the curve of the dial itself.

It’s as meta as dials get, with the hours, seconds and day nestled within and rotating around the main minute dial, a planetary complication that may take some getting used to to understand, but reads like timekeeping should have been this way from the beginning.

Never has there been such polarity between the sheer level of complexity of a watch and the beautiful simplicity of its operation, deceivingly slick in the way it all goes about its business. Even the crown gets Ressenced, hidden into the case back to give the swooping case a delicious symmetry.

There’s a full 212 parts inside the Type 1 Slim, a grossly unreasonable amount for such a functionally straightforward watch, and that’s just a part of what makes it great. It’s also the reason it costs £15,000.

Ferdinand Berthoud Chronomètre FB 1R.6-1

Ferdinand Berthoud’s Chronomètre FB 1R.6-1 may not be packing the catchiest title, but the 20-piece limited edition watch is certainly packing an eye-watering price tag of $257,000. That’s a lot for a stainless steel-cased watch—or at least it would be, were it not containing some especially hyperwatch level features.

Peep through the little window in the case side and you’ll start to understand what makes this watch so special—chiefly the constant force fusee and chain mechanism originally produced in high-grade pocket watches to guarantee uniform torque levels throughout the wind. Think of it like a CVT gearbox, where the gearing gets easier as the torque of the mainspring decreases when it winds down, cancelling each other out for even timekeeping.

That little chain, all 280mm of it, contains 474 links in stainless steel, each individually polished and capable of taking a load of up to three kilograms. Making sure you don’t apply more than that as the mainspring becomes fully wound is a Maltese cross stopwork device, and showing you how much of that power is left is the exposed, dial side power reserve indicator, whose mathematically calculated coil provides an accurate picture of the mainspring wind.

Drive to the tourbillon—of course it has a tourbillon—comes through a satellite differential transmission, because why not. You’ve earnt it.

Urwerk UR-112 Aggregat

If you’ve ever watched Groundhog Day and wished you could get a mechanical watch just like the alarm clock that torments Bill Murray every single morning, then thanks to the $300,000 Urwerk UR-112 Aggregat, you’re in luck.

Hours are displayed in the left window and minutes in the right, all digitally up the nearest five minutes, for that full radio alarm look. For a finer read on the minutes, however, there’s a vertically rotating indicator far right. It actually borrows its styling from the Bugatti Atlantic Type 57 SC, a streamlined, Art Deco masterpiece that is even more expensive than the watch. Throw in some DeLorean and a dash of nuclear reactor and you’ve got yourself a UR-112 Aggregat.

Within the sapphire cylinders from which the time is read are eight prisms, each with three sides, which snap instantaneously from one to the next to keep the timekeeping on point. It’s very much themed on Urwerk’s usual satellite system, but here operating within another dimension of spacetime.

If you hoped for more from one of Urwerk’s more insane watches, you’ve got it, because squeeze the two buttons either side of the case and the “bonnet” flips up, revealing two more displays. There’s the power reserve on the left and seconds on the right, the less necessary displays you only need to check to make sure everything’s good with your fancy new ticker.

Greubel Forsey Balancier

If you’ve got a quarter mill and you’re looking for the last word in finishing, there’s not much better to get than the 43.5mm Greubel Forsey Balancier. With just 33 pieces made, it’s a rare beast, but surprisingly one of the more affordable from the Greubel Forsey range, if you can imagine that price being anywhere near close to budget.

It’s not exactly a complicated watch, though. That front mounted balance from which it gets its name isn’t even a tourbillon, and you’re only getting a power reserve alongside the regular old time, so you might wonder what inspired the astronomical price tag.

Well, every single penny has been spent on finishing, which gleams here like no other watch. From the mirror-finished balance bridge to the concave recesses at the centre of the hands, every last opportunity to apply a ridiculous level of attention to detail has been taken. If there’s a surface, no matter how small, it’s been hand-treated with better care than a new-born infant. Exploring the watch is like wearing new glasses, with every edge and every surface popping in full technicolour 4D.

Here's some of examples of the finishing processes: the fine frosted texture on the central dial element is applied by hand brushing it with a metal brush. The countersinks are then mirror polished to the extreme. The edges are bevelled and polished, and then the sides are brushed. The underside is circular grained. Half of that is either invisible because it’s too small or just plain hidden from sight, but that’s the Greubel Forsey way. There’s a team of more than 20 people working on just a few hundred watches a year to give you an example of just how inefficient this process is. As if to make the point, there’s a little window in the case side to spy on the edge of the balance wheel, a part that rarely gets seen in any watch.

Flip it over and the biggest surprise awaits. No, not more movement, but a cascade of words that makes even Jack Torrence look sane. Thankfully, it’s not the ramblings of a madman, but simply the credo of the Greubel Forsey brand.

MB&F HM7 Aquapod

Last on our list is the maddest of the mad, MB&F, but one that takes that madness, wraps it up in a sleeveless jacket and turns it into a dive watch. That’s right, for any underwater enthusiast who’s been looking to accompany themselves with a $165,000 dive watch, the HM7 Aquapod is just for you. It may have arrived from space but it’s just as at home under the waves, all the way down to—well, just 50m. But you weren’t going to take this house-priced watch anywhere near the water, anyway, were you?

Inspired by what you Earthlings call a jellyfish, this 53.8mm domed UFO reads hours and minutes in two orbiting disks, the glowing, three-dimensional numbers read against a reference line on the side. Why not have the time at the top like a normal watch? Because of course this dive watch is too busy filling the sweet spot at the top of the dome with a one-minute flying tourbillon, which is illuminated in the gloom with three glowing panels. That makes perfect sense.

Making even more sense is the obligatory dive bezel, which is usually incorporated into the watch itself, but here floats around it like some sort of force field. Perfect for protecting the watch if you bang it against some rocks on your next dive.

Usually when you turn a pricey watch like this over, you’re greeted with beautiful traditional watchmaking, but in this instance it’s the gaping maw of a titanium lamprey, machined from a single block. The terrifying sight not only acts to self-wind the watch, it probably also serves as a deterrent from going any deeper than the watch’s 50m limit.