Teddy Baldassarre
Chiming Watches: 12 Exceptional Minute Repeaters, Alarms, Sonneries, a
Chiming watches represent one of the most coveted types of complicated watches in the world - despite the fact that they are also one of the most archaic and, in practical terms, obsolete. The most popular type is the minute repeater, which chimes the time audibly on demand; it was invented for pocket watches in the 18th and 19th Century as a practical method of alerting its wearer of the current time in the dark, in the era before electric lighting and luminous details on watch dials. Definitively regarded as more a luxury today than a tool, a minute repeater has an independent chiming mechanism with two small hammers striking coiled metal gongs, generally activated by a slide on the side of the case, to produce different tones for the hour, quarter hour, and minute. The most sophisticated of these chiming watches might also include a grande sonnerie, and/or petite sonnerie: the former perpetually strikes the hour every hour and the hour plus the quarter-hour at every quarter, without any need for the wearer to activate it with a slide; the latter strikes the hour every hour, and the quarter-hour (but not the hour) every quarter, also independently of any activation by the wearer. Sometimes the chiming functions are even coordinated with moving, elaborate dial animations called automata. Watches with chiming functions tend to be rather rare and almost always prodigiously expensive, but a handful of watchmakers have managed to create examples that are slightly less compl...
