Like all good sleights of hand, the illusion is both perfect and intriguing. A movement floats in the middle of a watch case that is generously transparent so as to heighten the sense of mystery. Magic is generally about tricks, cables, professional deftness, whether in watchmaking or on stage. Conjurers capable of these incredible tricks devote their technical and sometimes historical expertise to making their mechanisms appear to levitate.
Illusion
Magicians use secret panels, trap doors and diversions to muddle spectators’ senses. The watchmaker’s basic material in this domain is sapphire. Not the blue or pink gemstone used in jewelry, but rather a perfectly transparent man-made form of sapphire. Generally used to make scratch-resistant watch glasses, it has found its way into watches as a mainplate, as bridges – meaning a virtually invisible structure playing the same role as steel or brass. Blancpain used it to create the chassis of its L-Evolution Flying Sapphire Carrousel, but renounced total transparency by metallizing the watch glass in order to enhance legibility. While Corum Watches Wiki Replica went a step further with its Panoramic Tourbillon fitted with an invisible mainplate and bridges, they were still distinguish- able because they were juxtaposed. It was not until the historical specialist of this illusion reentered the scene that the magic truly worked its spell.
Mystery
This providential Houdini is of course Cartier. In the 1920s, the brand had introduced the “mystery” clocks whose hands appeared to be floating in thin air. They were in fact perched on rock crystal rings guided by a mechanism hidden in the body of these clocks. Cartier revived this concept in 2013. Now adapted to the wristwatch format, the intensity of the illusion has been heightened ever since. The latest model is called Rotonde de Cartier Astromystérieux. Its entire movement appears to be placed between two layers of air, at the very heart of the watch. Even those in the know still scratch their heads and wonder how it really works.
Corum is a Swiss luxury watch brand and was founded in 1955. The most popular watch show is that the Admiral’s Cup but Corum has also had success with the coin watch for instance. This timepiece was introduced in the 1960s and was famous because of its manual wind or quartz motion inside a $20 or a $10 coin. Corum is also admired for world premiers where each year limited editions are sold out shortly once they are available on the market. Severin Wunderman acquired Corum in 2000. This past year, the Swiss brand introduced a redesigned variant in a more traditional round event. At this year’s Baselworld view fair, Corum introduced yet another variation of the Golden Bridge, in a brand new, Art Deco-influenced rectangular instance. The baguette-shaped, linear-oriented, manual-winding motion, Caliber CO113, is observable in the middle of the open air and boasts a high amount of engraving and finishes on its 18k gold plate and bridges. It is surrounded on either side by 18k gold structures representing six Roman numerals whose curved shapes and rivets call into mind the structure of a bridge. The motion’s timekeeping functions are on full screen, together with the spring barrel at 6 o’clock feeding energy to the escapement at 12 o’clock. Caliber CO113 has a frequency of 28,800 vph (4 Hz) and a power reserve of 40 hours.
A fakir’s favorite piece of equipment is a wire, a principle that inspired Richard Mille. While the main purpose of the RM 27-01 was to achieve extreme lightness and shock-resistance, it has also explored a whole new avenue. Its movement is secured to the case by a set of cables (just 0.35mm in diameter), pulleys and tensioners. Merely hiding them would have been enough to make the caliber seem to float.
Trompe-l’oeil
There is another method that is apparently simple, yet difficult to implement : it involves giving pride of place to emptiness and calls for movements with distinctive structures. The baguette- type caliber of Corum’s Golden Bridge models is so narrow that it can be held to either end of the case, within which it looks amazingly free. The alternative is an ultra-skeletonized movement, such as that of the Tourbillon Volant Poinçon de Genève by Louis Vuitton. The structure of the caliber is slender and concealed beneath a dial and a tourbillon. The floating effect is achieved by clever means that are traditional yet mesmerizing.
