Magic Gold

2 minutes read
It sounds much like a distant dream, a watch housed in a beautiful 18-karat gold that is not scratchable. Leave it to Hublot to find and introduce something that sounds better than reality.


WORLDTEMPUS - 16 December 2011

Elizabeth Doerr


Hublot CEO Jean-Claude Biver was at his animated best yesterday morning. He had gathered about one hundred journalists from all over the world to witness the very first clump of unscratchable gold exiting the foundry he has installed on the ground floor of the Nyon factory.

The project, which sounds like a dream come true, was begun three years ago by Biver and Professor Andreas Mortensen of the Mechanical Metallurgy Laboratory of the EPFL's (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) Institute of Metals to find a way to make an 18-karat gold that is harder than tempered steel.

This will henceforth be known as Magic Gold; Hublot owns the only patent on it and will be the only user of it for the time being.

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The path to unscratchable

A major drawback to wearing a gold watch is that sooner or later it will need to be polished, particularly if it was highly polished to begin with. Gold is soft and scratches appear very quickly. This is the reason that 24-karat gold has never been used for watch cases and that only recently have 18-karat cases come into use. Historically, 14-karat gold cases have been most popular; though they have a lower gold content, they scratch less easily.

Basically, what the passionate technicians have done is to combine pure liquid gold with boron carbide, a powder that is compacted and pressed to make ceramic. The porous molded ceramic allows enough space to be filled with the liquid gold to the tune of 75 percent of the emerging composite metal. It has even been certified by the Central Office for Precious Metals in Bern, allowing Hublot to stamp it with the 18-karat mark – if it could be stamped.

The Magic Gold alloy is so hard that it indeed cannot be stamped. Pure 24-karat gold is usually between 25 and 50 on the Vickers scale of hardness, while regular 18-karat gold is 350-400 Vickers on average. Stainless steel usually has a hardness of 600 Vickers, while both Magic Gold and ceramic come in at around 1000 on the Vickers scale. Diamond – the hardest substance known to man – is 10,000 Vickers hard.

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Manufacture

One of Mortensen's graduate students working on the project was a creative thinker by the name of Senad Hasanovic. This young man came to Hublot along with the advent of the foundry to oversee its operation and continue the project. Though Hublot has not yet created a Magic Gold object, the composite has passed the experimental stage and the company expects to launch the first watch case made of the substance by Baselworld 2012. “The color of it will be gold, but it will be easily distinguishable from regular gold,” Biver explained. “The color is not yet finalized in its definition, but the idea is to have a special color for our new Hublot Magic Gold.” He also said that the precious material will be used to make watch components as well.

Despite not having actually manufactured a case out of Magic Gold as yet, Biver also insists that Hublot will also be able to use the process to make unscratchable platinum, palladium, aluminum, copper, nickel and even silver. “It will never have a scratch or even oxidize,” he promised. “And this is only the beginning.”


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