Emmanuel Bouchet Complication One now comes for the first time with a sapphire crystal case. These 44-millimetre Complication One Fusion cases second to diamonds in hardness, are extremely complex to make, and require hundreds of hours of machining and hand polishing – especially when reproducing the elegantly curved case sides known from the metallic models.
When Emmanuel Bouchet brought Complication One onto the watchmaking scene at the end of 2014, collectors and connoisseurs were in awe. The first eponymous watch from the master watchmaker, who used to work for brands like Parmigiani and Jaeger-LeCoultre, challenged fundamentals in watchmaking. For what should an escapement be used? How should minutes be read? What is our relationship with time?
“With my watches I want you to slow down,” said Mr. Bouchet about Complication One. An example of this emotional approach is the extra transmission escapement in the centre, well visible from the front. While remaining extremely precise, Mr. Bouchet’s transmission escapement is 75 times slower than the normal Swiss escapement (which distributes the energy to the balance wheel and second hand of this watch), thus giving you one single tick or a single tack every 15 seconds. When the transmission escapement makes such a move, it distributes the exact amount of power needed for the architectural frontside action of instantaneously jumping day and night indication, jumping hours, jumping minutes, and jumping 10 minutes. Jumping 10 minutes? Yes, the decimal minutes have their own hand, alongside the singular minute hand on the three o’clock subdial. This avant-garde innovation sounds complicated, but is in fact easy: for instance, with the decimal hand on five, and the singular hand on nine, you have 59 minutes.
A minute later, the decimal hand will return to zero in a retrograde manner. The hours are read to the left of the extra central escapement, and at 12 o’clock you find an unusually large small seconds combined with a night and day indicator. “To me, this division of time in five different levels – day and night, hour, 10 minutes, minutes, and seconds – is the perfect way of symbolising the present through movement,” said Mr. Bouchet. “The second is the smallest increment in quotidian timekeeping, and night or day the largest. To combine these two on the same subdial symbolises that even the largest thing is made up of tiny parts that are all equally important,” he continued.
The 100% Swiss Made Complication One is driven by Emmanuel Bouchet’s now skeletonized calibre EB63F, a unique and completely integrated (no modules) movement. It has two barrels providing 55 hours of power reserve. This may not sound like a lot for two barrels, but jumping hour, jumping decimal and normal minutes, and retrograde require a lot of power. And Emmanuel Bouchet assures near-perfect precision throughout the whole cycle.
The use of different materials in the Complication One collection is also applied on the subdials: the sapphire-cased Fusion has a mix of sapphire and titanium subdials, highlighting the best of Complication One Aleph and Contrast.
All Complication One models are, as all Emmanuel Bouchet watches, 100% Swiss made. Everything is made in Emmanuel Bouchet’s workshop but for a few components made by a handful of selected partners in Switzerland. This also goes for the sapphire case and discs.
Complication One is all about philosophy expressed through extremely precise mechanical watchmaking, offering a new type of philosophical complications. “I want to slow you down. I want to deconstruct and expand time. But is it art? That I leave for you to decide. All I know is that life is just a moment. A passing hour, a fleeting day, in a forever faster-moving world,” said Mr. Bouchet.
