Time, cut into
28,800 pieces
an hour.
Remontoir builds mechanical watches by hand in the Swiss Jura. The escapement turning at the edge of this page is beating in real time — five swings a second, forever, until someone forgets to wind it.
Everything a watch
does besides the time.
A complication is any function beyond hours and minutes. Each one is a small argument with entropy, solved in brass.
Tourbillon
A cage that rotates the whole escapement once a minute, averaging out the pull of gravity. Invented 1801 to help pocket watches kept upright in a waistcoat.
Minute repeater
On demand, hammers strike gongs to chime the time — hours, quarters, minutes. The hardest sound in horology to make beautiful.
Perpetual calendar
Knows the length of every month, including February in a leap year, until 2100 — when someone must nudge it, because 2100 is not a leap year and gears cannot read the exception.
Remontoir d'égalité
Our namesake. A tiny secondary spring, re-armed every second, that feeds the escapement one identical push at a time — so the watch runs as evenly at empty as at full.