The Luxury of Time

How do you put a pin on the most significant moments of your life? 

You could, like many, argue that what you wear on your wrist ‘just tells you time’. It doesn’t. It tells you who you are and where you’ve come from — from one moment to
the next. 

My grandfather passed away on September 12, 2007 at 5:35 in the evening. Along with the wealth of wisdom that he left behind, I inherited a 1962 Omega Seamaster — a dress watch with sleek gold bezel and a curved glass (they did not use sapphire crystal back then) with slender golden hands quietly ticking the time away. My Grandad beat Bond by about three decades. This is when I really began my journey into luxury time pieces.

A common question that anyone deals with when purchasing a few thousand-dollar watch is, why? What makes you buy a watch that ticks simply because of the movement of your wrist? The history of horology has gone through some tremendous upheavals. From the first watches ever made for royalty, watches gradually began serving explorers — the kinds that set out to discover India and Antarctica. Your life simply depended on it. If you wanted to find your way back home, you needed to learn the precise time it took to go from A to B considering the alignment of the stars which then told you how to go back. This oversimplification of nautical or exploration history tells us why the world needed accurate instruments to tell one where he is going and how long he should keep moving. What you probably don’t know is that on October 22, 1884; 26 nations decided that the world would use the Greenwich Meantime as the world’s reference of time. So, the next time you look at a GMT watch, you’ll know that international law has had its role to play in the evolution of modern watchmaking.

From explorers, watches reached the wealthy and despite constant technological breakthroughs, the automatic or manual watch has survived. Why does the world continue to love the mechanical movement? After the discovery of the quartz movement, people no longer needed to take the effort of winding their watches up or worrying about them losing charge. We now have watches that will let you measure your heart rate, show directions to your favorite restaurant or let you take a call. Yet, the mechanical movement is still thriving as the epitome of luxury. So why do horologists prefer to hear their watches tick?

For the longest time I have had my sights on the Jaeger LeCoultre Atmos. I recently moved into my own chamber. To put it simply, the Atmos is the closest that horology has come to a perpetual mechanical movement. So long as my office temperature changes by one degree Celsius, this clock will continue to tick. Its appeal lies not just in its aesthetic beauty but in the fact that a small capsule of ethylene chloride gas is responsible for the most important decisions of my day.

The luxury of such watches begins to make sense when you consider the sheer man hours that goes into making something like complicated like a JLC Ultra Slim Perpetual Calendar movement with Moon phase to something like a jumping seconds, or a gyro-tourbillion. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Skelton in rose gold, the Patek Phillipe Grand Complication are a few on my list. The craftsmanship that each piece goes through is nothing short of breath-taking.

The importance of these watches isn’t just the function of accurately telling you the time, day, date, month, year (factoring leap years) for 103 years or accurately describing the phases of the moon for the next thousand years or counteracting the effects of gravity on your watch’s movement to give you the most accurate rendition of time on your wrist. Its beauty lies in its perfect interaction of many intricate mechanisms and hundreds of parts to do it — and the craftsmanship that it takes to make something as extraordinary as this. 

You can tell a lot about a person from what he or she wears on his or her wrist. Einstein authored the theory of relativity and revolutionised time forever. His Longines sold for almost $600,000. The Queen of England and the longest serving Monarch Queen Elizabeth wore a Jaeger LeCoultre Calibre 101 at her coronation in 1953 which weighed all of 1 gram. JFK wore a Cartier Tank. My latest milestone, though somewhat modest in comparison, has been an A. Lange & Sohne manual winding timepiece. And for those of you who are connoisseurs, it tells you something about me. To buy a German hand winding watch rather than a Swiss/French classic of the same cost tells you what I value and what luxury means to me. To paraphrase Aladdin, it’s not just what you see on the outside but what is inside that counts.