Among the various fantastical new watches displayed at the SIHH watch fair in Geneva this week, one brand has revealed what can only be described as the very antithesis of the Apple Watch, despite bearing more than a passing resemblance to the wearable.
The Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black from H Moser & Cie may have the rectangular dark shape familiar to fans of Apple’s smartwatch, but rather than waking on command to reveal the time, this high-end timepiece has no dial, hands or any other means by which to display the current time. Instead, the Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black relies purely on sound to communicate the hours and minutes of the day.
Here’s how it works. The Concept Black uses a one-minute flying tourbillon, designed to counteract the effects of gravity on the watch’s movement, at 6 o'clock. In order to discern the time, the wearer must listen for the piece’s minute repeater function, an old complication employed before electricity and luminescence that through a series of chimes emanating from the watch itself told the owner the exact time to the minute. In short: you have to listen, very carefully, to hear the time.
H Moser & Cie is clearly enjoying the juxtaposition of creating a watch that, in its own words, is a “nod to a highly prestigious watchmaking tradition” while also looking just like a smartwatch. Indeed, the company states that the watch is intended to look like a smartwatch on standby. And it does.
The platinum Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black has a power reserve of at least 87 hours, though that comes at the expense of functions such as taking an ECG for your cardiologist to consult, taking calls or streaming music. Not to mention that adjusting the time on the watch will seemingly require considerable skill. A marking engraved on the crown allows the time to be corrected using a graduation, which only appears when the crown is pulled out, with 12 indices each representing five minutes.
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As for the noise produced to tell the time, to amplify the sound of the hours, quarter-hours and minutes produced by the two angled gongs within the watch, the case middle has had to be entirely hollowed out to create sufficient space for a resonance chamber.
Still, it’s somewhat remarkable that a fan of high-end watches would wish to own a piece that looks like an Apple Watch, costs vastly more (£274,852, to be precise), is less accurate and just happens to be a watch where one cannot easily, or at all visually, tell the time. What's more, it has already sold and the company has received requests to make more, which it will in different colourways. Welcome to the wonderful, and at times just plain crazy, world of horology.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
