Watch brands love an anniversary, big or small, and treat them as a way to showcase their technical skill. This year, Audemars Piguet celebrates its 150th, so it’s no surprise its research and development teams worked for five years to create something they believe might change watchmaking for the next 150.
Bloomberg
On Feb. 17, AP showcased the fruits of that labor at the Arc, the watchmaker’s nearly 194,000-square-foot new manufacture in Le Brassus, Switzerland. The futuristic building (which is still only partially open) curves around the existing Manufacture des Forges and brings much of AP’s production across the Vallée de Joux under one roof. Here, Chief Executive Officer Ilaria Resta and her team showed new watches and celebrated the brand’s history.
The star of the show was calibre 7138, the new perpetual calendar movement, called a quantième perpétuel, or QP, in French. Sebastian Vivas, the company’s heritage and museum director, said, “The QP is the game changer.”
A perpetual calendar is one of horology’s oldest and most esteemed complications. It will accurately show the day of the week, date, month, week number and moon phase, even across leap years (which it also indicates, usually on a small subdial with four segments). Keep it wound, and it will be accurate until the year 2100—when there’s a single-day deviation in the Gregorian calendar.
Audemars Piguet is a master of this format, which it first put in pocket watches in 1875, then in wristwatches in the 1920s. (In 1955, AP made the world’s first perpetual calendar wristwatch with a leap-year indication.)
However, perpetual calendars are notoriously tricky to set. Most calendar functions are adjusted with a series of discreet correctors on the side of the case, and the watch comes with a dedicated tool to change them. Of course, as research and development director Lucas Raggi notes, many people lose their tools and set their perpetual calendars with whatever fits, like an earring back or a pen tip, which can scratch the case.
Setting them requires precision; if you go one correction too far on some models, it takes dozens or even hundreds of pushes to correct it. Raggi says he commonly sees collectors with perpetual calendar watches that are incorrectly set just because they can’t be bothered to go through all the steps to fix it. To make matters worse, the complex array of gears and wheels can easily break while correcting the calendar, especially if the wearer changes it close to midnight when the date change happens automatically.
This is all set to change with the invention of calibre 7138, a movement (watchspeak for the engine of a watch) that relies on a single crown to set every function for the calendar. It was introduced that day at the Arc, to excited murmurs from assembled journalists.
Turning the crown clockwise in position one, flush to the case, winds the watch. Pull the crown into position two, and you have two functions: a clockwise turn sets the date, and a counterclockwise turn the month and leap year. Position three sets the time in both directions. Return to position two, and a new function is activated. This position is called “two prime,” a first in watchmaking. (When Raggi and Giulio Papi, director of watch conception, unveiled this, the room of watch journalists was filled with gasps.)
A clockwise turn sets the day and week, and counterclockwise sets the moon phase. In addition, watchmakers protected the movement, so it’s impossible to change the date between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. and potentially break it. Vivas says these invisible technical improvements and achievements are setting the brand’s course for the next 150 years.
The calibre 7138 can be found in three new watches—one in AP’s Code 11.59 line, with an 18-karat white gold case that has an embossed blue dial with a guilloche motif. It retails for 109,300 Swiss francs ($121,796). The Royal Oak line has the new movement in two models: The first is in the brand’s proprietary “sand gold,” a unique hue that sits between rose and white gold thanks to an alloy of gold, palladium and copper. It goes for 130,000 francs. The second is in the brand’s classic stainless steel case with a blue PVD Grande Tapisserie dial, priced at 109,300 francs. These watches are in regular production, and there are also three limited editions of 150 pieces each, identified by the vintage-inspired Audemars Piguet logo at 6 o’clock.
In addition to the perpetual calendar, Audemars Piguet unveiled several other new watches. The Royal Oak Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon Extra-Thin makes its Code 11.59 debut in beige. It has a sand gold case with diamonds decorating the lugs, middle case and crown, and a matching beige alligator strap. The dial has an embossed, circular guilloche motif that seems to radiate from the flying tourbillon. It’s priced at 149,000 francs.
Other releases are new colors of existing timepieces. The brand released five new Code 11.59 Grande Sonnerie Carillon Supersonnerie watches with wildly different designs, for example. Two have an opal dial with a beautiful play of color; the stone appears to shine with many colors depending on the light. These gorgeous watches are priced at 761,300 francs. In contrast, the three openworked models showcase the watch’s complex inner machinery, come in varying shades of gray, and are priced at 715,000 francs each.
The US market gets first dibs on an exclusive new color for the Code 11.59 Selfwinding Chronograph 41mm: a rich Tuscany-blue grained dial paired with a polished 18-karat white gold and blue ceramic case. The dial has discreet diamond hour markers that look almost like metal at first glance. It comes out in the US in March before its worldwide release in June. It’s limited to 100 pieces and priced at 85,600 francs.
The Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar Openworked 150th Anniversary watch is the last timepiece with the brand’s calibre 5135. It has a titanium and Bulk Metallic Glass (BMG) case and bracelet that are ultralight, an openworked dial that displays the movement, and brilliant blue accents. It retails for 175,000 francs.
Audemars Piguet will continue to unveil new watches throughout each year to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
