The Race to Develop the World’s Thinnest Watch

Watchmakers love a good arms race. The primary and maybe most enduring being the race to equip a timepiece with the utmost variety of features, or issues—a distinction presently held by Vacheron Constantin’s breakthrough Reference 57260, launched in 2015, which has 57 of them. Then, after all, there’s the matter of depth. Amongst diving watches, Omega trumps all with its 6,000-meter Seamaster Planet Ocean Extremely Deep, as lined on this column earlier this 12 months.

Now consideration has shifted to thinness. The title of world’s thinnest mechanical watch has been held by Piaget’s Altiplano Final Idea: Your complete watch is simply 2-mm thick, achieved with a combination of latest strategies and micron-level-precision part manufacturing, most notably putting off a baseplate and constructing the motion straight on the caseback.

However tiny measurements can create enormous issues. Offered in 2018, the Altiplano solely went into manufacturing in 2020 (with not more than 10 items being made a 12 months) and required excessive feats of engineering, together with changes to permit for minute distortions created by the strain in an plane cabin in order that the crystal wouldn’t come into contact with the palms and interrupt the functioning of the motion.

Then in late March of this 12 months, Bulgari’s 1.8-mm Octo Finissimo Extremely nabbed the world’s thinnest title. It, too, saved house with the caseback doubling as a baseplate whereas, apparently, displaying hours, minutes, and seconds on separate dials—the logic being that extra wheels made for fewer overlaps, ergo much less peak. For winding and setting, as an alternative of a crown there are two toothed wheels mounted on the caseback. It’s completely in step with the aesthetic of the Octo Finissimo, one of many few genuinely iconic watch designs of the 21^st century. With this report, the Italian jeweler added to its popularity in excessive watchmaking.

Bulgari’s stint on the high resulted in about three months. In July, Richard Mille and Ferrari joined forces to unveil an excellent thinner watch. The RM UP-01 is simply 1.75 mm, seems to be like a bank card, and is a tremendous feat. However statistics alone don’t inform the total story of the RM UP-01.

It’s a conceptually radical watch. The parts are unstacked and organized in a planar trend throughout a big floor space, and the palms, usually discrete parts, are utilized instantly onto the wheels. Extremely, and in contrast to Piaget’s and Bulgari’s skinny creations, Richard Mille respects the standard idea of a motion with a baseplate housed inside a case. Given the Ferrari partnership—“most visibly expressed within the selection of supplies and execution of the watch,” in accordance with the model—it’s useful to think about the RM UP-01 as corresponding to an Formulation 1 automobile. Simply as these automobiles bear solely a partial resemblance to a normal street automobile, the RM UP-01 seems to be uncommon for a watch. The design is a departure from the acquainted high-tech tonneau with which the model is related, however there are some acquainted Mille touches, just like the spline screws studding the bezel.

The RM UP-01 is excessive watchmaking at its most daring, difficult the accepted notion of what a watch seems to be like and pushing the expertise and ingenuity required to create it. However record-breaking doesn’t come low-cost. At virtually $1.9 million, you might be paying simply over a thousand {dollars} per micron.

A model of this tory initially appeared within the October 2022 problem of GQ with the title “Survival of the Slimmest”.