84 posts tagged IWC

It’s that time of year - everyone is adjusting their clocks and watches to reflect summer time as the days get longer and longer. On March 30th, Schaffhausen will turn its clocks forward one hour, so we thought it appropriate this week to discuss a watch that is all about adjusting the time on the fly - the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer.

The Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer starts with the same foundation as IWC’s other Pilot watches - there is the matte black dial with extremely legible white numbers and markers, broad, easy to see hands, and the altimeter-inspired triple date window. It even retains the anti-magnetic soft-iron inner case and hacking seconds functions. But, added to all this are 24-hour and cities rings around the perimeter of the main dial, offering a whole new realm of functionality.  

Reading the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer is very straightforward. The main dial tells you your local time, and your current timezone is indicated by the arrow at 12 o’clock pointing to the corresponding timezone on the cities ring. Adjusting your local time, forwards or backwards, can be done simply with the crown, which can either fully set the time to the second or jump full hours one at a time. Then, to read the time in any of the 24 timezones on the ring, you simply read the hour on the 24-hour dial that sits next to the timezone in which you want to know local time. Easy enough, right?

Drawing on the real military heritage of the IWC Pilot’s watch, the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer also includes UTC (Universal Tim Coordinated), a military standard time allowing coordination of forces all over the world. It might not be something you’ll use on a daily basis, but it’s a nice nod to the history of the IWC Pilot. 

So whether you’re moving across timezones, or just adjust the time in your own, it doesn’t get much easier than with the Pilot’s Watch Worldtimer.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen

Well, it’s officially the first day of spring - though depending on where you live, it might not feel like it quite yet. To celebrate, we thought we would take a look at one of the most important parts of any watch, the balance spring.

Though it is tough to imagine, balance springs are a relatively recent invention in the history of timekeeping. The first balance spring was invented in 1675, finally creating a reliable alternative to the pendulum as a regulating organ. But it wasn’t until Abraham-Louis Breguet arrived in the eighteenth century that we a more precise form of balance spring that is still used in top-tier watchmaking today.

IWC employs Breguet springs in its in-house calibers 51000 and 59000 (found in watches such as the Portuguese Automatic and Portofino Hand-Wound Eight Days), which is no simple feat. Getting the spring shaped just-so, conforming to a special Phillips curve, requires skilled watchmakers to manually pull and twist the spring under a microscope. Tolerances can be as little as hundredths of millimeters, and the process is both expensive and laborious. 

But what about the balance spring allowed the modern watch to develop as it has? To begin with, it provides a compact solution to a problem that previously required more massive responses - you can’t exactly carry a pendulum around all day, let alone keep it moving at a constant rate. And this brings us to the second innovation, consistency. Breguet’s coil allowed for an extremely accurate beat-rate to be set with the balance wheel, and advances in material sciences have allowed us over the last few decades to produce springs more consistent over time than ever before.

The most significant weakness of the balance spring is its susceptibility to gravity, and thus the tourbillon was born. In a pocket watch, which sat in one vertical position all day, the balance spring would be pulled down by gravity, negatively impacting accuracy. By constantly rotating the balance in a cage, this effect is distributed evenly on all parts of the spring, eliminating the inconsistencies. In  wristwatches this is much less of a problem, though watching the balance spring beat away inside an elegantly spinning tourbillon is still a beautiful sight.

-HODINKEE for IWC Schaffhausen