Just Because Six Unusual Mechanical Watch Movements You Might've Never Seen

Showing hours, minutes, and seconds, Xhevdet Rexhepi’s inaugural release under his eponymous brand may look like your standard, well-finished indie watch. If you’re familiar with the Rexhepi name, however, you’d know that there’s very little that’s standard about the watches carrying it. So, don’t be alarmed when, at the end of each minute, your shiny new Minute Inerte stops, and then suddenly restarts - and most certainly don’t try to shake it like that sketchy watch dealer showing you their “serviced” offering.

Inspired by Swiss railway clocks, the Minute Inerte’s small seconds hand completes a revolution in 58 seconds, before stopping for two, and advances together with the jumping minute hand. Unlike the railway clocks (or the quartz-powered Mondaine Stop2Go, which is modelled after them), Rexhepi’s watch doesn’t wait for a synchronising electrical impulse during those two seconds, but recreating their function in mechanical form is just as good if you ask me.

Sailing and fine mechanical watches have long been talked about in the same breath, but for Baselworld 2016, Ulysse Nardin looked to sailing inspiration in quite a literal way, recreating the boom and rigging in a retrograde-style display. Sitting above the teak deck dial is a blued boom, pulled by impossibly thin wires controlled by winches located on either side of the tourbillon at 6 o’clock.

Unlike traditional retrogrades - not that this is anything like one in the first place - the signature, rapid snap back to zero at the top of every hour is replaced by a smooth gliding as one winch winds and the other unwinds.

If there was one thing you wouldn’t want to introduce to a mechanical watch movement, it would be liquid - and I bet you it’s this paradox that drove HYT’s engineers to decide to display time using it. You could really pick any HYT watch for its bellows-powered, immiscible fluid hours indication housed in a borosilicate capillary. The Chronode-developed movement is tucked away behind the time displays, with the majority of the dial taken up by the bellows that control the retrograde hours complication. A combination of a piston and snail cam drives the bellows until the time hits six o’clock, before the pressure on the piston is released, and the bellows automatically compensates for this release of pressure.

Similarly to the Ulysse Nardin, the indication doesn’t snap back immediately, but slowly resets, though timekeeping is unaffected. Why did I pick the H4 Metropolis? Well, in addition to this fluidic time display, it also has a mainspring-powered LED light that makes the whole thing light up better than Super-LumiNova ever could.

There is no other brand that embodies mid-2000s opulence, love of enormous watches, and questionable taste better than de Grisogono. And yet, this is a brand that won a GPHG award, and it was thanks to this watch - the Meccanico dG. Below the analogue time readout, the watch features a seven-segment display akin to those you’d see on your microwave or washing machine, but executed with the help of 23 synchronised cams corresponding to the total number of segments.

Released to celebrate de Grisogono’s 15th anniversary, founder Fawaz Gruosi relied on the experience of Chronode’s Jean-François Mojon - unsurprisingly, like many other digital-display mechanical watches, this one took a very long time to get right. Long enough, it turns out, for the company to go bust in the Luanda Leaks scandal.

Most of the time, I have no trouble getting the general idea of a new movement development, even if the specifics elude me. But upon seeing Cartier’s Masse Mystérieuse for the first time, I genuinely had no idea what I was looking at. In the ultimate ode to the brand’s history of mystery clocks and complications, the Masse Mystérieuse houses its entire movement in the winding rotor that freely spins behind the two hands, all seemingly suspended in mid-air.

Sure, it’s a mystery dial, meaning that there’s some manner of sapphire crystal trickery going on, but the optical illusion is truly second to none. In this case, it’s six separate pieces of sapphire slab, some even geared to the keyless works to adjust the time, while a differential separates them from the movement/rotor and allows them to move independently.

Mid-2010s TAG Heuer was an avant-garde horological force to be reckoned with, devising all sorts of novel ways of furthering watchmaking technology. The 2010 Pendulum Concept was heralded as the first mechanical watch without a hairspring, replacing it with magnets, and realised several years later at Baselworld 2013.

The tech was meant to improve upon the physical limitations of a hairspring, which is subject to wear over time through friction and shocks, and limits things like beat rate. The initial idea saw a magnetic array surround a rotating magnetic disc, with its shape causing it to oscillate in the same way you’d expect a balance wheel to.

The MikroPendulumS took it to an all-new level, integrating the magnetic “balance” into dual tourbillons, one oscillating at 12Hz, and the other at no less than 50Hz, the former used for the time, and the latter for the chronograph.