Jack Forster

POSTS BY Jack Forster

STAR CHILD: THE IWC PORTUGUESE SIDÉRALE SCAFUSIA

It’s being hailed as one of the most complicated watches ever made by the International Watch Company of Schaffhausen. Best know for its high precision instrument watches and pilot’s watches, IWC has taken the connection with the world of the sky and stars hinted at by the navigation instrument inspired watches in its collection and brought it to an unprecedented new level. The Portuguese Sidérale Scafusia gets its name from a different way of telling time: sidereal time, or “star” time, used by astronomers to calculate the position of stars in the sky. An ordinary watch tells mean solar time READ MORE

CUTTING EDGE COMPLICATION: PIAGET’S ULTRA THIN EMPERADOR COUSSIN TOURBILLON AUTOMATIC

There’s no company better known than Piaget for making the kind of watch that was once the last word in elegance: thin, gold, and automatic. Piaget originally made its name and reputation for both ultra luxurious jewelry watches for ladies, and for creating some of the thinnest movements –and thus, thinnest watches –ever made. Now that classicism is back in style (and really, was it ever out?) Piaget’s star is on the rise, with its super soigné men’s watches like the Altiplano (a mere whisper over 5mm thick) appearing on discerning wrists everywhere. At the top of its pinnacle of READ MORE

AMERICAN HERITAGE: VACHERON CONSTANTIN HISTORIQUES AMERICAN 1921 BOUTIQUE NEW YORK

Vacheron Constantin is famous among horological cognoscenti for being the oldest of the great Swiss watchmaking firms –in continuous operation since 1755, it’s been active in the United States since 1832, and over the years it’s counted among its fans the Wright Brothers (for whom the firm made the watch used to time the first powered flights in 1903) William James (brother of novelist Henry James) and financier Henry Graves, who owned a complicated Vacheron Constantin pocket watch which sold at a recent Christie’s auction for the princely sum of $1,762,500 –over twice the maximum estimate. And both Harry Truman READ MORE

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE CAPTAIN WINSOR ANNUAL CALENDAR

The name Zenith might conjure images of old television sets and radios to a lot of Americans but to watch lovers, it’s a magic word that summons images of one of Switzerland’s most respected manufacturers. Zenith’s history goes all the way back to its founding in 1865 in the Swiss village of Le Locle, where it’s still headquartered today, and it made its reputation in its early days with high precision navigation watches, marine chronometers, and the ultra rare and collectible observatory grade wristwatch chronometers it manufactured for clients for whom beauty and precision were one and the same. In READ MORE

WAYBACK MACHINE: THE LEGACY MACHINE 1 FROM MAXIMILIAN BÜSSER & FRIENDS

There’s nobody quite like Maximilian Büsser –or like his company, Maximilian Büsser & Friends, a cooperative of designers, watchmakers, and other assorted talents which he put together in 2005 after leaving his position as head of the fine watchmaking department at Harry Winston. The goal of MB&F, as fans (and they are legion) like to call it, is to create every year a new “Horological Machine” that captures the idiosyncratic vision of Büsser himself, as well as the collaborator with whom he’s chosen to work on each year’s design. In an industry where it usually takes three to five years READ MORE

BORN IN FIRE: THE UR-110ZrN TORPEDO

The watches of Urwerk are a very new twist on a very old idea. In Urwerk watches, a “time satellite” carrying the hour indication crosses a sector of the dial marked with the minutes; as the satellite carrier reaches the 60 minute mark a new hour marker appears at 0 and the whole process starts over. The complication’s called a wandering hours display, and though it’s hundreds of years old, this ain’t your daddy’s wandering hour watch. Urwerk has been more successful than perhaps any other modern watch manufacturer in creating a new take on an ancient idea that not only makes READ MORE