Benoit Mintiens thought long and hard before deciding to put an electronic component into his Type 2 watch, the concept version of which launched a couple of years ago. Here was a £38,000 watch with its e-Crown, which linked it to your smartphone, so the time is spot-on whenever you go to put it on. At that price, the founder/designer behind Ressence pondered, watch fans don’t typically want components that are not easily replaced, or which require batteries. 

“And, what’s more, I know that the batteries we use in that watch for sure won’t exist in maybe 10 years time,” he says. “We can’t even be sure we’ll be using smart-phones in decades to come. So we’re involved in the blending of two worlds – the mechanical, which has worked well for centuries, largely unchanged, and which would keep doing so for centuries more – and the technological. And I deliberated hard because I didn’t want the watch to become obsolete. But big new, disruptive ideas do come along.”

 

Technical drawing of George Daniels Blue wristwatch showing movement design for A Collected Man London

 A technical drawing for George Daniels' Blue wristwatch.

 

Indeed, with a boom in our understanding of metallurgy and materials science, with ever more advanced computer-guided machinery capable of working at ever finer tolerances, it’s small wonder that there are high-end watches today that would astound a watchmaker of just a few decades ago. The watch world has always made small advances. But now it is seeing an interweaving of the traditional and the futuristic at a breakneck, if thrilling, pace.

“No wonder people are often confused by the seeming conflict between cutting-edge design and old-school materials, between the use of very new and very old methods in the same piece,” reckons Max Busser, founder of MB&F, with a sapphire top-plat