#Folio watch pendulum series#

No matter how hard a watchmaker tries, the poise, or balance, of a balance can never be perfect, and those inconsistencies in the balance wheel are amplified by being stuck in the same position. To be a bit more specific, it’s not just the impact of gravity on the balance wheel, but the impact of gravity on the balance wheel’s imperfections. Whilst the escapement anchors the position of its components relative to one another, there’s nothing stopping the entire thing being encapsulated and continually rotated in one direction, just like a wheel. So, how does the tourbillon work exactly? Well, just like the wheel of the toy car we described earlier. If you pay $110,000 for a handcrafted work of art, you want to be able to see it! How Does A Tourbillon Work? Rather than have the central shaft of the tourbillon mounted at both ends, Helwig devised a system stable enough to secure it from just one end, such that it can be enjoyed unobstructed. The type of tourbillon you see here in the Lange & Heyne Anton is known as a flying tourbillon, invented by fellow German watchmaker Alfred Helwig. The trials were actually revived in 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary, and once again, a tourbillon took the prize, a Jaeger-LeCoultre. No two were identical, built to perform in gruelling competitions lasting 16 weeks, during which hundreds of entries were tested to the extreme. Each one was hand-crafted and tuned individually, like the engine of a Formula 1 car.

By 1801, the single axis tourbillon was patented, and would become the precision tool of the best watchmakers for many centuries to come.ĭuring the chronometer trials of the early 20th century, where watchmakers were put to the ultimate accuracy test, the tourbillon became a must-have piece of tech to stand any chance of performing. It was in fact on the turn of that century, in 1795, that Breguet conjured the idea. To his name is credited the invention of the self-winding movement, the balance spring overcoil, the gong spring, balance jewel shock protection and, of course, the tourbillon. The story of the tourbillon’s invention surrounds one Abraham-Louis Breguet, a Swiss watchmaker of the 18th century who’s considered one of the best to have ever lived. It wouldn’t be able to swing properly, and that’s the problem the balance wheel has, on a much smaller scale. Imagine the pendulum in the grandfather clock, but the grandfather clock isn’t kept at the same upright angle. So, why the tourbillon? Because the balance wheel doesn’t spin continually in the same direction, instead bouncing back and forth, it means its position relative to gravity has an effect on its performance. The pallet fork and escape wheel are specially designed to cope with that changing direction. And so, rather than spinning in one direction like the wheels of the toy car, it bounces backwards and forwards, like the round version of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. This adds a further problem, that when the spring compresses it reaches a point of maximum compression and wants to spring back. The balance wheel spins around like the wheels of the car, but with no real weight to control it, a smaller spring, the balance spring, is added to add resistance.

Except, instead of the entire thing being the mass it has to move, there’s a much smaller mass instead, the balance wheel. The escapement is like the interaction between the wheels and the ground in the toy car, controlling the speed of the movement.

#Folio watch pendulum series#

There’s the gear train, a series of wheels that converts the speed of the mainspring into the hours and minutes on the dial, and then there’s the escapement, made up of three parts, the escape wheel, pallet fork and balance wheel. The resistance caused by propelling its own mass along the floor is what regulates it.Ī mechanical watch has both these things. Think about a wind-up toy car: fully wound and off the floor, the wheels spin like crazy. In any kind of clockwork mechanism, that power in the spring needs two things to work: one, gearing that converts the speed and torque to an appropriate level, and two, some kind of resistance to stop it unwinding all at once. Rather than being powered by a battery, a mechanical watch draws from a coiled spring, housed in a barrel. To understand why the tourbillon exists, first we need to cover a little background on the mechanical watch.