Chris Small looks at how Swiss watchmaker Piaget took the edge in the contest to create the world’s thinnest automatic.
A difference of roughly a millimetre in a new product when compared to a rival’s is scarcely cause for consternation. In watchmaking circles, however, the announcement that Piaget’s latest dress watch, the Altiplano Ultimate Automatic 910P, is setting a new record for thinness is big news.
We’re familiar with televisions, laptops and mobile phones that get thinner and thinner, while cars appear to get ever-larger, padded out with crash safety features and lavish upholstery. There is a degree of sense to both trends: we like computers that are light and easy to carry, and comfortable cars that are less likely to kill the driver or passengers. But why would you want an ultra-thin watch?
Watches in general have ballooned in size since the 1960s, and something that would have been seen as a bulky, specialist tool back then seems modest by today’s standards. But there has always been a subset of watchmakers competing to make timepieces as wafer-like as possible.
There are many reasons that you would not want an ultra-thin watch. They tend to boast very poor water resistance, because the thin case cannot withstand the pressure and has no room for rubber waterproofing gaskets. They are notably finicky and hard to repair when they do go wrong, because every piece within them has been put on a crash diet, reduced down to its barest essence. Typically, they are hand-wound, because the oscillating weight used to drive an automatic watch adds a lot of bulk, so you have to remember to wind them. They also won’t run for very long because you can’t fit a decent-sized mainspring inside.
But hold on a second; this is the world of luxury watchmaking and such common-sense concerns are hardly becoming. To produce a super-slim watch is to prove you can do what others cannot: if we love watches for their feats of micro-engineering, we love these slimmer onesall the more. Creating ultra-thin watches is considered as challenging as creating watch calendars and chronographs.
These constraints mean that when records are broken, it tends to be in almost hair-splitting increments (when Jaeger-LeCoultre pinched the record for thinnest mechanical watch in 2016 it was by a margin of just 0.05mm). But Piaget has taken an Olympic lead on the competition. The previous thinnest automatic watch (Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo Automatic) is 5.15mm thick; but the Piaget 910P Ultimate Automatic is just 4.3mm from front to back – that’s 16.5 per cent slimmer. This has been three years in the making and will be the source of considerable pride for those involved.
So, I hear you cry, how do they do it? Piaget has got plenty of experience in this field: as far back as the late 1950s this Swiss watchmaker was creating ultra-thin movements, setting a record for automatics in 1960s. For the 910P Ultimate Automatic, it has deployed every trick in its arsenal. The case doubles as a mainplate; the movement construction is flipped back-to-front; it is wound by a peripheral rotor that spins around the edges of the movement; and the dial and hands themselves sit alongside, rather than atop, the mechanics that power them. If that had your eyes glazing over, just take my word for it that 238 working components have somehow been brought together in a space the size of a poker chip. What’s really impressive is that along the way, Piaget has squeezed out 50 hours of power reserve, meaning you can put it down on Friday and pick it back up on Monday without a hitch.
This does have consequences upon the design and the dial resembles a normal watch ensnared in a pincer movement of gears and wheels, although Piaget has made a virtue of it and you can’t deny every piece is finely hand-finished. Piaget happens to be right on top of another trend, for so-called “skeletonised” watches that show off their inner workings. Although, it makes me wonder where you go from here – when the aesthetics are so tightly bound up with the engineering, your options for evolution are limited.
Wearing such a watch is uncanny; there aren’t many things you can spend £24,100 on and then forget they’re there. It’s so light, it feels as though it has vanished into thin air. Which is apt for a watch named after one of the world’s largest areas of high plateau. But when you do pay it attention, it’s beguiling to think that it works. Watchmaking may not be the most advanced of technologies, but to misquote Arthur C Clarke, it seems almost indistinguishable from magic.
