A Tourbillon Spinning on Four Axes at Once

The Jacob & Co. Astronomia Four-Axis Tourbillon is 47mm wide and 27mm thick. For scale, you could stack two Submariners and still be under that height. It is made of rose gold and sapphire, and most of what is inside it moves.

Source: studio.hodinkee.com

 

Jacob & Co. is the brand serious collectors are most comfortable dismissing. The company came out of Manhattan's diamond district, its founder made his name selling jewellery to hip-hop artists in the 1990s, and the watches have always been loud in a way that Swiss tradition finds embarrassing. What gets lost in the sneering is that the mechanics inside these things are difficult, and the two watches here are a decent argument for taking the brand seriously even while you decline to wear one.

What a Four-Axis Tourbillon Is Doing

Start with the ordinary version. A tourbillon puts the balance wheel and escapement inside a rotating cage, usually turning once a minute, so that gravity's pull on the balance averages out across every position instead of dragging the rate in one direction. Abraham-Louis Breguet patented it in 1801 for pocket watches, which sat upright in a waistcoat all day.

 

A wristwatch moves constantly, so the problem the tourbillon solves has mostly gone away. Everyone in the industry knows this and builds them anyway, because a rotating escapement is the most watchable thing a movement can do.

 

A multi-axis tourbillon takes that logic somewhere else entirely. Instead of one cage spinning on one plane, you get cages inside cages, each turning on a different axis at a different speed, so the escapement tumbles through space. The Astronomia Four-Axis has a triple-axis flying tourbillon mounted on the arm of a carousel that itself completes a full turn every sixty seconds, which is where the fourth axis comes from. On the opposite arm sits the subdial showing hours and minutes, orbiting the centre of the watch as it goes.

 

That orbiting time display creates a problem worth appreciating. If the arm simply carried the dial around, the numerals would end up upside down for half of every rotation. Jacob & Co. gears it so the subdial stays upright the whole way round, which means the dial rotates against its own arm at exactly the rate needed to cancel the orbit out.

Source: studio.hodinkee.com

The Energy Problem

All that spinning costs energy, which is the engineering problem hiding underneath the show.

A mainspring does not deliver even power. Fully wound it pushes hard, and as it unwinds it pushes progressively less, which changes how far the balance swings and therefore how well the watch keeps time. In a normal watch the effect is small enough to live with. In a watch dragging several rotating cages and a full carousel around, the difference between a full barrel and an empty one becomes serious.

 

Both of these watches use a constant-force device to deal with it. The idea is old. You put a small secondary spring between the barrel and the escapement, and you rewind that little spring at very short intervals, so the escapement never sees the mainspring directly and receives an identical dose of energy every time. In the Four-Axis, that rewinding happens six times every second. Jacob & Co. has patents pending on the mechanism.

 

The Four-Axis calibre, the JCAM54, runs to 485 parts. The Régulateur's JCAM56 has 552 and uses two barrels to supply the power.

Source: studio.hodinkee.com

The Régulateur

The second watch takes a much older idea and treats it strangely.

Régulateur clocks were the reference timepieces in watchmaking workshops, the master clock every other watch on the bench got set against. Because they had to be read accurately from across a room, the hours, minutes and seconds were separated onto their own displays instead of sharing a centre, which is the layout that gives the style its name.

 

Jacob & Co. has kept the separation and put all of it in motion. One arm of the carousel carries the hours and minutes, another carries a double-axis flying tourbillon, and both swing around the dial once a minute. The seconds appear on a translucent blue dome that turns anticlockwise against a fixed gold pointer at six o'clock. The case is rose gold with a band cut from a single ring of sapphire, so you watch the mechanism from the side as well as from above.

 

It measures 43mm across and 18mm thick, which makes it the most restrained watch in the Astronomia line. Restrained is doing heavy lifting in that sentence.

Source: studio.hodinkee.com

Where I Land on This Brand

I usually talk to people who mostly want the opposite of this, and I have watched collectors dismiss Jacob & Co. without ever looking at what is inside one. That reflex says more about the buyer than the brand.

 

The honest position is that these are two separate products sharing a case. There is the visual object, which is gold and sapphire and coloured aluminium and deliberate spectacle, and your reaction to that is a matter of taste that nobody can argue you out of. Then there is the mechanism, which involves multi-axis rotation, patented constant force, hundreds of components and problems that the great conservative houses have generally chosen not to take on. A watchmaker looking at the JCAM54 sees real work.

 

You are also paying for something with no pretence of usefulness. A four-axis tourbillon improves nothing. It exists to be watched, and the constant-force device exists because the thing being watched is so demanding that the movement needed extra engineering to survive it. There is a certain honesty in that. Nobody at Jacob & Co. is claiming this watch will keep better time than a Grand Seiko.

 

The people who buy these are not confused about any of it. They know the watch is enormous, they know the tourbillon does nothing for accuracy, and they bought it anyway because they wanted the most animated object they could put on a wrist. Jacob & Co. has built a business by taking that customer seriously while the rest of the industry pretends he does not exist.

Source: studio.hodinkee.com