A brief history of the most infamous and highly distributed Swiss movement.
The last we checked, the deadline was somewhere out in 2019 (2023 for Nivarox hairsprings – a much more difficult technology to reproduce).
And thus, ETA has become the little (watch) engine that could, that did, and now won’t for much longer.
Some industry analysts will see the irony of Mr Biver moving into the smartwatch business. He is largely credited with having saved the Swiss watch industry from the proliferation of quartz movements in the 1970s and 1980s by emphasising the virtues of handmade mechanical timepieces.
A 1980s campaign he launched as head of the Blancpain watchmaker he revived stated defiantly: “Since 1735 there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be.”
This is quiet simply the most unique and complicated timepiece ever made.
The Henry Graves’ Patek Philippe Supercomplication represents the pinacle of watchmaking, featuring 24 complications, twenty-four. It took 7 years to develop, starting in 1925, no computer involved in the process. It weights around 500 grams and 70mm in diameter.
It’s been previously sold in 1999, for a staggering $11’000’000.
Today, on November 11th, 2014, Sotheby’s will be making history, again, by auctioning the most important watch ever made.
In short, the Apple WATCH means nothing to Swiss manufactures.
If smartwatches were ever to totally supplant traditional mechanical watches, I believe it would be a sign of something much more momentous: a large-scale abandonment of the luxurious and the artisanal in favor of the mass-market and the utilitarian. And somehow that is difficult to imagine.
Of course who ever buys this watch will not drive a rusty Ford Pinto and most likely has never heard of Timex, they are the 1% of the 1%, and are far more interested in the fact that the Graff Hallucination is a one of a kind, ultra-rare piece of Haute Horlogerie and Haute Joaillerie combined. A watch that cannot be made again, simply because the same diamonds, in the same quality and the same cut-styles cannot be found again. This makes the Graff Hallucination nothing less than a rare piece of art, and given the current market prices for a Van Gogh or Klimt, you might actually get a deal with this Graff.
Abnormal Capitalist 