Sixty years ago, before the advent of cheap and accurate Japanese-made quartz timepieces all but decimated the Swiss watch industry, mechanical wristwatches had one overriding purpose: to keep time with unwavering accuracy.
“But in the modern age, or what we call the mechanical renaissance and thereafter, precision hasn’t been a huge subject,” said Elizabeth Doerr, a watch journalist in Karlsruhe, Germany. “Mechanical watches are precise enough for most of us. If you want more precision, then you have to have a quartz watch.”
Try telling that to Rolex. The watchmaker — which in 2024 had estimated sales of 10.6 billion Swiss francs ($12.9 billion), or almost a third of all Swiss watch sales — is now at the forefront of an industrywide effort to ensure that precision-focused mechanical timepieces maintain their relevance in a world that doesn’t actually need them.
On April 1, at the Watches and Wonders Geneva trade fair, the brand introduced its first new model in 13 years. Known as the Land-Dweller, the watch was the talk of the town (at least before President Trump’s tariff announcement the next day usurped the conversation).
While many commenters focused on the watch’s slim styling and integrated bracelet, watch insiders devoted the lion’s share of attention to the Land-Dweller’s entirely new mechanical movement. Specifically, on what many people at the fair and around the trade called its game-changing Dynapulse escapement (the term refers to the mechanical watch mechanism that controls the release of energy from the mainspring to the hands).
Widely hailed as more energy efficient and shock resistant and therefore more robust and longer-lasting than existing escapements — such as the traditional Swiss lever escapement, which for more than two centuries has served as the industry standard — the Dynapulse gave technically inclined fans of watchmaking plenty to admire.
“An accomplishment like this happens every couple hundred years in the field of mechanical watches,” said Paul Boutros, the deputy chairman and head of watches in the Americas at the auctioneer Phillips. “It’s that big of a deal. The mastery of so many different sciences, including mathematics and physics, to be able to do this is just incredible.”
James Dowling, who collects, studies and writes about Rolexes — and goes by @MisterRolex on Instagram — said that by encasing the mechanism in a new model, the brand was sending a clear message: “They’re saying, ‘This is not your dad’s Rolex.’”
Beyond the Land-Dweller’s significance to Rolex fans, however, lies a broader story about chronometry, or accurate time measurement, as well as the pursuit of precision in an industry that long ago ceded ground to quartz watchmakers and more recently to satellites.
“Alive On the Wrist”
To Oliver R. Müller, the founder of LuxeConsult, a watch consultancy near Lausanne, Switzerland, the Swiss watch trade’s continued devotion to precision time keeping is its defining paradox: “We are in a world where we can read the ultimate time on the computer, phone, fridge, anywhere. And then we come up with very complicated micromechanical devices and we pretend we are at the ultimate precision.”
Over the past 15 years, independent watchmakers — including François-Paul Journe, Bernhard Lederer, Laurent Ferrier and Kari Voutilainen — have developed new escapements designed to optimize accuracy and precision, but Rolex’s Dynapulse escapement stands apart, according to watch insiders, because it has been industrialized.
“When you make 10, 15, 20, 50 chronometers, it’s OK. It’s still a big achievement,” Mr. Müller said. “But when you do 100,000, 500,000, a million — wow. Rolex have set themselves above anyone else. I don’t see any brand, except Omega, capable of competing.”
He brings up a delicate point. In 1999, Omega industrialized its own groundbreaking escapement, based on an invention by the watchmaker George Daniels. Known as the coaxial escapement, the mechanism, which helped improve time-keeping performance by significantly reducing the need for lubricating oil, is now central to what Omega calls its range of master chronometers.
While there has been some speculation that Rolex was motivated to create the new escapement by a desire to best Omega in the chronometry arena, many people cited Rolex’s traditional philosophy of excellence as reason enough for it to expend the effort, time and money to develop the Land-Dweller’s silicon-enhanced movement. (Privately owned and famously secretive, Rolex would not reveal how much it spent on the project; Mr. Boutros estimated it could have cost as much as $1 billion.)
Jack Forster, the global editorial director of the 1916 Company in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., which is in the process of absorbing Govberg, Radcliffe and Hyde Park jewelers as well as the pre-owned dealer WatchBox, put it bluntly: “Precision is on a certain level what Rolex is all about,” he said.
Yet he, too, noted the paradox.
“It’s been game over for mechanical horology for a long time in terms of absolute precision,” Mr. Forster said. “Now, that doesn’t mean it’s game over from a problem-solving standpoint. Clearly, there’s a huge market in the luxury world based on the completely irrational, but also very understandable, idea that a mechanical watch is alive on the wrist in a way that a quartz watch is not and could never be.
“That’s the foundation for continuing to research things like the coaxial escapement and the Dynapulse escapement,” Mr. Forster added. “The idea is to show that the art of mechanical watchmaking has not stagnated. And that’s exciting.”
In Good Company
For all the attention Rolex has received since introducing the Land-Dweller, it was hardly the only watch unveiled at Watches and Wonders to promote superior precision.
During a press appointment, Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the co-president of Chopard, pointed to the brand’s new L’Heure du Diamant timepiece, the first model in the collection to feature a complication.
“Here we are with a very thin, small movement and a moon phase, which is astronomical not in price, but in function: 122 years’ precision,” Mr. Scheufele said of the $101,000 diamond-set wristwatch. “You probably will think that’s not the point for a jewelry watch.”
But, he added, “whether you need it or you don’t, the quest for precision and quality is built into the DNA of watchmaking.”
And not just of the Swiss variety. In Geneva, the Japanese watchmaker Grand Seiko made its own statement about chronometry when it debuted the Spring Drive U.F.A. (or, Ultra Fine Accuracy), a $10,900 model that keeps time at a rate of plus or minus 20 seconds per year. For comparison, the Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres, known as COSC, the independent Swiss body that officially certifies chronometers, maintains a standard of accuracy between minus four and plus six seconds per day.
Joe Kirk, Grand Seiko’s brand curator, said the model was the latest in a series of timepieces that stemmed from the brand’s founding ethos.
“Back in 1960, the aim of Grand Seiko was to make the best possible practical everyday watch,” Mr. Kirk said in a recent phone interview. “Initially, we aimed for specs that met those of chronometers. Then we wanted to aim higher, so we introduced our own standard in 1966.
“Then in 1969, we introduced the V.F.A., Very Fine Adjusted, a mechanical piece that was accurate within one minute per month,” he added, noting that the watch came out the same year that Seiko, Grand Seiko’s sibling brand, introduced the Astron, the first quartz wristwatch to be sold commercially.
Spring Drive, a hybrid movement that is arguably Grand Seiko’s most notable technical innovation, came out in 1999, when the brand invented a way to attain quartz-level accuracy in a mechanical watch by using a quartz oscillator powered by a mainspring. The new U.F.A. watch represents the pinnacle of Spring Drive precision, Mr. Kirk said, but as with its predecessors, it is all in service of a rather straightforward objective.
“The goal is to make the customer happy,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than owning a watch that doesn’t keep good time — that’ll drive you crazy.”
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