Jack Forster

POSTS BY Jack Forster

The Ultimate Shield: Omega Announces New Record in Antimagnetic Watches

Magnetism was, through most of the history of watchmaking, a significant problem. The issue was at the very heart of the watch itself. There are two coiled springs inside a watch –one, the mainspring, provides power. The other, far more delicate, is the spiral balance spring, so thin that it’s also called the hairspring. Its inner coil is attached to the axis of the balance wheel, and its outer end is fixed to the plate of the watch; it’s what determines how fast, and how regularly, the balance swings back and forth (in other words, how fast it ticks.) As READ MORE

Fast Company : IWC Goes To The Track With Formula One

The Mercedes Benz AMG Petronas Formula One team is the newest high testosterone partnership for the company whose motto is “engineered for men.” READ MORE

Time of Your Own: Jaeger-LeCoultre Launches the Duometre “Unique Travel Time” Watch in Paris

The world time watch is one of the most useful, but also one of the most potentially troubling complications in watchmaking. Its usefulness is self-evident: a watch that can allow a world traveler to easily see the correct time anywhere in the world, they are at the same time slaves to human caprice. The reason for this is that the time in any given time zone is a combination of nature and human meddling –while the rotation of the Earth defines a day, the way in which time is told in any given country is a matter of statute, not READ MORE

Song of Time: The Jaquet Droz Bird Minute Repeater

Anyone who’s seen the movie Hugo –that love letter both to the history of the cinema, and to the fascination of complicated mechanics –knows what an automaton is. Pierre Jaquet-Droz, the watchmaker whose name is now that of the creator of some of the world’s most beautiful horological works of fine art, was famous not only as a watchmaker, but also as a creator of automata –those eerily lifelike robots, their movements programmed by a series of elaborate cams and levers, who do perform movements that are capable of amazing viewers even today. Able to write, draw, and even play READ MORE

FIRST LOOK: THE HARRY WINSTON MIDNIGHT COLLECTION MIDNIGHT SKELETON WATCH

The whole notion of a skeleton watch in a collection called “Midnight” is a delightful, Halloween-ish conceit, and the watch is just as delightful –well, one is tempted to say, “in the flesh,” but of course, what a skeletonized watch is, is exactly the opposite. Skeletonizing, or openworking, is the art of taking a watch movement –the mechanism that enables the watch to keep time –and removing as much metal as you dare, without fatally compromising the strength of the movement or its ability to function. The tricky part of all this is that a watch movement often already consists READ MORE