9-Year Project for Timepiece With 1,728 Parts, 33 Functions : Swiss Firm Took Long Time to Build World’s Most Complicated Watch

It takes five years for one of the 184 tiny wheels in a new Swiss watch to complete a single revolution. Another wheel takes a century. Then after 400 years, a lever has to be moved so the watch’s calendar won’t skip a leap year date.

It also is the first timepiece to calculate the date of Easter and features a celestial chart showing the Milky Way and 2,800 Northern Hemisphere stars.

The 18-karat gold Calibre 89, which has a diameter of 3.4 inches and weighs 2.4 pounds, has two dials and 24 hands. Packed among its parts are 68 springs, 126 jewels and 332 screws.

Patek Philippe, the Geneva company that recently unveiled the Calibre 89 to mark its 150th anniversary, says it hasn’t any idea how much it can sell the watch for, so it plans to auction it off April 9 in Geneva.

“We estimate that it will get between 5 million and 10 million Swiss francs ($3.2 million and $6.4 million),” said Osvaldo Patrizzi, the watch expert at Habsburg, Feldman auctioneers of Geneva.

$1.2 Million Sale

To date, the highest price paid for a timepiece at an auction was $1.2 million in 1984 for a clock from the mid-17th Century.

Patek officials say the company did not keep any accounting of how much Calibre 89 cost to make since it was not done for marketing purposes.

But Patek is not likely to be contested in its claim that the Calibre 89 is the world’s most complicated watch.

A team of watchmakers took more than five years to design its 1,728 parts and four years more to assemble them.

“At some points, we were greatly worried that we would not succeed,” said Jean-Pierre Musy, the head of the firm’s Complicated Pieces Department.

1927 Packard Watch

Calibre 89 has 33 functions. That is 19 more than the firm’s Packard watch of 1927, which it bought back last year for $1.3 million.

Calibre 89’s features include a daily display of the sunrise and sunset, chimes that ring on the hour and half-hour, and “power reserve” indicators that show when rewinding is needed. The mainspring can run for 30 hours.

But the makers’ pride is the watch’s “perpetual secular calendar.”

It takes into account that a leap year is skipped at the turn of most centuries by the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582. Only the century years that are exactly divisible by 400, such as 2000 and 2400, have a Feb. 29.

To keep it “up to date,” the complicated mechanism makes one wheel turn once every five years, triggering a 20-tooth “century wheel” to move on by one notch. A peg gives that wheel an extra push every 100 years, thus disengaging the calendar mechanism on three out of four century years to skip the leap year. A lever re-engages the mechanism after 400 years.

Special Cog

The date of Easter, which changes every year, is shown on the watch at midnight of the preceding Dec. 31. Calculating the date for more than 30 years would require additional mechanisms that would not fit into the watch. So a special cog allowing the watch to display it must be replaced every 30 years.

Computers helped produce 1,600 blueprints for the watch.

“We could have managed without them,” said designer Francois Devaut, who conceded that he first thought the plan for Calibre 89 was a “utopian idea.”

“But it would have taken us an additional four or five years.”

Paul Buclin of the assembly team said synchronizing the various mechanisms was the biggest challenge. It would take about two months to take the watch apart and reassemble it.

Can’t Match Quartz Watch

Its accuracy, within one minute a month, does not match a cheap quartz watch.

“But precision is not the most important thing,” said Philippe Stern, the company’s managing director. “The tradition of watchmaking is.”

Based in Geneva, where the craft dates to the late 16th Century, Patek Philippe is the oldest family-owned watchmaker in the world. The Stern family bought the company in 1932.

Stern said the company hopes to make three more Calibre 89s over the next four years, including one for the its private collection of historic watches.

The first one will be auctioned April 9, along with 300 other precious Patek Philippe watches, after an exhibition tour of Paris, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore.