Monday, September 26, 2011

Ulysse Nardin's most useful watchmaking asset

Ulysse Nardin received an early, though not quickly apparent, head begin within the watch industry's latest engineering race. That advantage came in 1998, when longtime collaborator Ludwig Oechslin presented CEO Rolf Schnyder using a modified antique carriage clock. Oechslin had fitted the foot-tall transportable clock with an escapement of his personal design, which in the end prompted the business to make the most important redesign from the mechanical motion in virtually two centuries.

Rolex, Patek Philippe, and also other main manufacturers now are updating motion mechanics with components produced from silicium (the Latin word for silicon and also the industry's preferred term for your materials) and with new mechanism configurations that improve accuracy. Nonetheless, Ulysse Nardin experimented in these locations years just before its larger rivals did. Obviously, such as the advance guard in any technology, Ulysse Nardin has had to endure a series of failures en route to achievement.

The same is true of Oechslin and his clock. Oechslin, the scientist and scholar who has intended Ulysse Nardin's most difficult pieces, tinkered with escapements to deal with the inefficiencies in the normal mechanical movement's regulating organ, the anchor escapement, which has been in use given that the early 19th century. Since it generates friction as it releases energy, the anchor escapement requires continuous lubrication. This flaw minimizes precision and dictates frequent servicing with the watch. Oechslin conceived a design that-instead of incorporating the traditional escape wheel and interlocking pallet-pairs two toothed wheels advancing with each other to release the power of the mainspring and power the beat with the balance wheel. The interlocking teeth don't scrape against one another, and they supply a steadier impulse for the balance wheel. Soon after years of experimentation and refinement, Oechslin installed a functioning prototype in his carriage clock and showed it to Schnyder.

Born in gabicce mare, Italy, and raised in Lucerne, Switzerland, the 55-year-old Oechslin will be the archetypal bespectacled, brilliant-but-eccentric genius. He attained his watchmaking diploma in the Solothurn watchmaking school a year soon after he earned doctorates in philosophy, theoretical physics, and astronomy in the University of Berne. Oechslin also has studied archaeology, ancient history, Greek, and Latin. Presently, he serves since the curator with the International Watch Museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds.

Oechslin, who operates for that brand on a contract basis, also is Ulysse Nardin's most valuable watchmaking asset as well as the mastermind behind the company's most ambitious tasks. Within the mid-1980s he was pursuing clockmaking and restoration when among his pieces, an astrolabe clock that tracked the sun and moon, came towards the attention of Schnyder. The two met and collaborated on the Astrolabium Galileo Galilei, a 1985 wristwatch that signifies the signs of the zodiac, the height and course from the sun, sunrise and sunset times, the position of the moon and also the key fixed stars, the phases from the moon, moonrise and moonset, and solar and lunar eclipses. The watch, the primary of what would turn out to be a trio of astronomic watches known as the Trilogy of Time, aided define the technical nature in the revitalized brand.

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