SJX Watches
Highlights: Exotic Mechanics at Christie’s Hong Kong
A menagerie of exotic movements features in Christie’s upcoming Hong Kong auction, Important Watches: Featuring “Kronos: Titans of Time”, “The Eternity” and “The Chronicle” Collections, from Double Splits and double movements to torque management and monitoring. Lot 2352 – F.P. Journe Chronomètre À Résonance (Brass Movement) While the current iteration of the Chronomètre À Résonance is far more elaborate, using a differential to split the trains — each of which contains its own constant force device — this early F.P. Journe Chronomètre À Résonance with its 18k pink gold dial was much more ambitious in its time, developed by an upstart restorationist from Paris in a market that was hostile to independent brands compared to today. Resonance timepieces, or more accurately, those using coupled oscillators, can be traced all the way back to Christiaan Huygens, also known for inventing the pendulum clock and many, many contributions to mathematics and the sciences. He described the coupling of his pendulum clocks as an “an odd kind of sympathy” and sought to exploit this dampening effect to make pendulum clocks viable at sea, though this was ultimately unsuccessful. It would take more than a hundred years for Abraham-Louis Breguet — often hailed as the greatest watchmaker — to bring this phenomena to a watch, and then almost two hundred more for arguably the greatest living watchmaker to bring it to the wrist. That was, of course, François-P...
