SJX Watches
In-Depth: Patek Philippe Calibre 89
In 1989, Geneva’s storied watchmaker unveiled the most complicated watch ever made – the Patek Philippe Calibre 89. The genesis of the Calibre 89 arguably started almost a century before with a watch made in Besançon, the historical heart of French watchmaking. In 1977, the Association Française des Amateurs d’Horlogerie Ancienne (AFAHA) published the first issue of its journal Horlogerie Ancienne. The watch on the cover was the Leroy 01. The caption on the inside front page read, “Montre Leroy 01, la plus compliquée du monde” – “The most complicated watch in the world”. Inside, on page 15, a short article made the case: the Leroy 01, completed in 1904 by the Parisian firm of Louis Leroy for the Portuguese collector António Augusto de Carvalho Monteiro, held a title that no other timepiece had successfully disputed. In Geneva, the claim was noted. The first issue of Horlogerie Ancienne of 1977. Image – SJX composite/AFAHA Two years later, in early June 1979, Philippe Stern was at his desk in Patek Philippe’s offices on the rue du Rhône when Max Studer, the firm’s technical director, came in for what the records describe as a routine meeting. The 150th anniversary of the manufacture was a decade away. Among the ideas being considered to celebrate the occasion was a reproduction of the Henry Graves Jr. Supercomplication, the watch Patek had built in 1932, with its twenty-four complications, that had served as the benchmark of mechanical ambition ev...
