Complications - The Mechanical Watch Variety

Complications - The Mechanical Watch Variety

This article relates to The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

In Hannah Tinti's novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hawley and Jove are sent to recover an antique watch, a priceless item stolen from a crooked boxing promoter and now in the hands of a thief-survivalist living on an island off Washington's coast. The watch has many complications, the term used for any mechanical watch function other than telling time. Hawley becomes fascinated with the device:

The watch was warm from his body and heavy in his palm ... A beating pulse in an antique tomb. He heard a gear click into place and then the watch began to chime.

It was more than a simple marking of an hour. The watch was playing a song. Sweet and melancholy, with the tone of a wind-up music box, as if a miniature orchestra made of tiny bells had been waiting for this exact moment to play for him ... Complications ... playing music or charting the stars or marking the tide or the weather. The higher the number of complications, the higher the price of the watch. The one in his hand was supposed to be worth eleven million.

Although many modern mechanical watches have incredible complications, it is their antique counterparts that reap significant amounts when at auction. Eighty years ago, New York-based American businessman Henry Graves Jr. charged Patek Philippe to make the world's most complicated watch - that is to say the watch with the most complications. It took the Swiss company eight years to design and construct the device with a total of 24 complications including chimes, a perpetual calendar and a celestial map of New York as seen from Graves' New York apartment - and it held the record for the watch with the most complications for 50 years.

It was then a rich man's bauble. Of late, it's become a billionaire's bauble: a bit over two years ago, the device, known as the Patek Philippe Supercomplication was auctioned by Sotheby for $24,000,000. Although the Patek holds the record for value at auction, another Swiss company holds the current record for the most complicated watch. The Vacheron Constantin Reference 57260, introduced in 2015, has 57 complications.

Patek Philippe Supercomplication
Vacheron Constantin Reference 57260

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. It originally ran in April 2017 and has been updated for the January 2018 paperback edition. Go to magazine.