Chronométrie Ferdinand Berthoud is a young brand with a long history. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry, it’s actually very simple. The maker of the award-winning watches Chronomètre FB 1 and Chronomètre FB 2 was founded by Karl-Friedrich Scheufele in 2015, who dedicated the brand to perpetuating and building upon the legacy of the eponymous master watchmaker (1727–1807), creating chronometers of elegance and utmost skill.
Now, Chronométrie Ferdinand Berthoud have released their newest timepiece — Chronomètre FB 3SPC — a fitting sequel to its predecessors. While FB 1 took its inspiration from the constant-force mechanisms of antique marine chronometers, incorporating a fusée-chaîne into its movement, FB 2 brought things a step further, adding a remontoir d’égalité (which allowed for a dead-seconds display). Instead of working with mechanisms that improve the existing chronometric performance of a watch, FB 3 goes straight to the source of a timepiece’s chronometry: the hairspring.
As you know, the hairspring is the essential component in the regulating organ of a watch that creates the actual oscillating motion of the balance assembly, hence enabling the watch to keep time. One of the persistent concerns in watchmaking is how to get the hairspring to expand and contract its coils (an action also referred to as “breathing”) with greater geometric regularity. One solution frequently used by high-precision marine chronometers was to install cylindrical hairsprings as part of their regulating organs. Cylindrical hairsprings breathe with greater concentricity, minimising the lateral perturbations to the balance wheel and resulting in higher overall timekeeping performance.
Cylindrical hairsprings perform best when they are oriented with their plane of oscillation parallel to the ground — which is to say that the stacked coils should be upright. This happens when the wrist wearing the watch is also parallel to the ground. When the wrist is hanging down by the side of the wearer, however, the spring suffers from the same negative effects of gravity that affect every hairspring, whether flat or cylindrical. The team at Ferdinand Berthoud explained that while modern wristwatches with cylindrical hairsprings are few and far between, they tend to be fitted in tourbillons, which allows watchmakers to compensate for any gravity-induced errors.
The Chronomètre FB 3SPC is not a tourbillon watch, and the watchmakers at Ferdinand Berthoud undertook months of research and fine-tuning to optimise the final form and terminal curves of their cylindrical hairspring, that it might yield excellent timing results even without the compensatory mechanism of a tourbillon. This watch is not inspired by one of Ferdinand Berthoud’s historical marine chronometers, as the previous watches were, but by the No. 26 decimal watch created by Berthoud’s nephew and protegé, Pierre-Louis Berthoud (known as Louis Berthoud). In line with the high standards of Chronométrie Ferdinand Berthoud and the stellar creations of its eponymous source of inspiration, Chronomètre FB 3SPC is a COSC-certified chronometer.
