Last September, Editor-in-Chief Carl Cunanan flew north to dive deep into waters off Hong Kong, without any life support. Carl was invited to join a handful of alumnos to be instructed by freedive record holder and Oris brand ambassador Carlos Coste. The experience was both an ordeal and a revelation. Diving deep into darker waters and mounting pressure, Carl had to awaken his body's latent adaptations for hoarding finite air while being crushed at depth. Here is his story. Part 1: So Deep It's Dark

When one conjures up Russian creations, we tend to bring up familiar names like Igor Sikorsky (Sikorsky helicopters), Mikhail Koshkin (chief designer of T-34 Russian tanks) and Alexei Tupolev (designer of the Tupolev Tu-144 and the Boran space shuttle). With watch enthusiasts, Poljot is a brand that comes to mind as the company was the earliest watchmaking company formed in the Soviet federation.The Russian watch industry during the Czar Russia was focused on the assembly of imported movements mainly from Germany and Switzerland,

Horacio Pagani has up and done it again. As if he wasn’t busy enough with building his Zonda supercars, he is opening a new facility half a block away from his headquarters in Modena. The new facility is three times larger with carbon fiber ovens consequently three times the size they are now, it will help speed up the production line immensely along with the space to develop entirely new products. If there was even a smidgen of doubt whether the Pagani Company was healthy or not, the presentation of the expansion program was enough to convince me of Horacio’s resolve.

THE SOUL OF A NEW MANUFACTURE There is an interesting constant at Baselworld. No pun intended, as it’ll be made clear. There is something I have seen since the very first time I attended that wonderful, chaotic horological meeting place almost a decade ago, and in spite of all the change and relative chaos of this year’s event I saw it again.The days before Baselworld opens, all the brands are putting the final touches on their booths. Everything from million-dollar watches to priceless antiques to vintage cars to chairs and drinking water is brought in. In the middle of all that,

The Navitron Steampunk Wrist Compass and Sundial Advertisements in gas-lit England would’ve labelled this a sunwatch, as made by sunwatchmakers with names composed of initials and notable surnames. Now the things have been fashioned into wearable sunwatches, wrist-sunwatches if you like, to attract steampunk aficionados with their off-beat tastes for improbable practicalities. I’ll admit that I’m one of them.But does it really work? It should, though not while being worn on the wrist.

Urwerk founder Felix Baumgartner himself shows us how to crank a charge into the EMC's Maxon generator. If you thought he was winding the EMC's mechanical movement, the vigorousness of the cranking would be very unsettling.

Editor-in-Chief Carl Cunanan takes a stroll through old Geneva with the MB&F Legacy Machine No. 2 perched proudly on his wrist. With him on loan from the MB&F showroom in Geneva, Carl felt compelled to document his fleeting moment with the LM2--short, but so very sweet.

Chopard presents two spectacular pieces of horological machinery at BaselworldAt Baselworld 2013, Swiss Luxury Brand Chopard treated Calibre and the rest of the world’s press to their annual presentation at their ultra-ritzy pavilion. Among all the other pavilions in Hall 0.1, the main presentation hall of the watch fair, Chopard’s is one of the only pavilions that actually looked like a standalone boutique.During the presentation,

There are many castles in Germany, but Linderhof in the deep Bavarian south ranks among the most famous and is certainly a fascinating gem to visit.Linderhof was built by Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria from 1864 to his mysterious death by drowning in a mountain lake in 1886. He was also called the “fairy-tale king”, because for much of his life he personified a romantic figure that might have emerged from a distant, primeval mythology. Linderhof is the only one he was able to complete during his lifetime.It is patterned after French prototypes of the preceding century,

MB&F REINVENTS THE DAYS OF FUTURE PAST Maximilian Busser is the First among Friends at Maximilian Busser & Friends, otherwise known as MB&F. He and the people that he gathers to him have given us four of their Horological Machines, the unconventional and free-fancy watches that turn the ideas of watchmaking on their head. He is free to roam where his imagination takes him. Many of his watches don’t even make sense… until you see them in person, in action. Once you see how they work, they become not only sensible but… almost inevitable.

Christian Redl’s next challenge and the Edox Iceman II For a man, the irony of it will be excruciating, and for his timepiece, the extremes, mollifying. Extreme free diver Christian Redl who set the world record for diving under ice last year, now joins the Gokyo Project at Nepal’s Mount Everest National Park to challenge the glacial lakes of the Gokyo wetlands.On February 12, 2011, Redl dove 200 feet down into the frigid waters of Lake Weissensee in the Austrian Alps. The dive saw Redl descending at a rate of almost five feet per second and touching down after 42 seconds,

Bremont salutes the P-51 Mustang with a limited edition chronograph. An actual reliquary, the timepiece incorporates parts fashioned from the aluminum skin of a WWII veteran with a history that puts it in sorties above embattled Manila. In 2011, the award winning British brand Bremont introduced the Limited Edition Mustang P-51 watch—a salute to this phenomenal American-built fighter plane of World War II.From Bremont’s pre-release press statement (for the complete text and specifications,