This is MB&F’s contribution to this year’s Only Watch event – a collaboration with Chinese artist, Huang Hankang. Only watch is a charity auction that happens every two years to be benefit research into duchenne muscular dystrophy. Many well known haute horlogerie brands contribute one-offs to the auction. This year’s edition will take place in Monaco on the 22nd of September 2011.
Every year French brand, Lip, reissues an old classic from their back catalog. This year, they have launched two remakes – Lip De Gaulle and Himalaya. The original General de Gaulle 1952 watch featured an electronic movement and was not only worn by France’s President de Gaulle, but by Dwight Einsenhower and Bill Clinton. Both of whom are American Presidents. The General de Gaulle re-issue comes with an automatic movement.
The Himalaya is a homage to the original namesake created in 1954. The original Himalaya was popular with the sports playing crowd back in the day due to its shock resistance, though i don’t know if the re-issue is similar in nature.
What do you do when you are the maker of the only mechanical movement in the world that doesn’t make a sound. That’s right. No ticking sound.
Well, in the case of Seiko, who just built their first ever minute repeater watch, you engineer the sound by using a ’silent governor’ the uses the air inside the movement to control the speed of the striking gong.
As part of their 130th anniversary commemorative collection, Seiko has re-created three limited edition Grand Seiko watches that pay homage to their original Grand Seiko model in 1960.
Grand Seiko used to be a special mechanical range that was only available in Japan but now its available worldwide. The Gold and Platinum editions will be limited to an edition of 130 pcs, while the Steel version will be limited to 1300 pcs.
Tag Heuer’s new concept chronograph is the world’s first mechanical watch that measures and displays the 1/1,000th of a second, making it 125 times more accurate than most existing mechanical chronographs and 10 times faster than the Heuer Carrera Mikrograph 1/100th Second world first presented in Geneva in January 2011.
At 1/1,000th of a second, a Formula One racecar at full throttle travels about ten centimeters. Over a 305 km race, this might not seem much — the length of a finger — but it is the difference between second place and a World Championship.
Ulyssee Nardin follows up with its Freak watch with the Freak Diavolo. The watch features a carousel tourbillion that also indicates the minute. #Baselworld 2011.
One of the watches I missed at Baselworld: The La Clef du Temps watch by Hublot. Apart from looking science fiction, the watch allows the user to slow or speed up its movement (i was about to write speed up ‘time’ but that would factually incorrect :^)). Again, Ablogtoread has covered an interesting back story on the watch.
New from Omega at Baselworld 2011: The Omega Hour Vision Skeleton watch and a Ladymatic with an updated band. Both of them use a Co-Axial Calibre movement
This year at Baselworld 2011, Concord presents a haute joaillerie version of their C1 Chronograph called the Amethyst. The watch features 217 baguette-cut amethysts totalling 13.80 carats.
Two years in the making, The Antoine Martin Quantieme Perpetual QP01 is a hand wound perpetual calendar watch. A Blog to Read has a detailed back story about this watch.
