Richard Mille gives volume to his passion.
If watchmaker Richard Mille were to say that he was making something unusual, people would probably do well to pay attention.
The Richard Mille watchmaking company officially came into existence in 2001, as its founder wanted to create a watch company that would extend from roots in the Swiss villages of the industry's birth to the latest possibilities of high technology and materials. Richard Mille had been in the watchmaking industry since 1973. He joined the prestigious Mauboussin house in 1994. In 1998 he resigned from Mauboussin as President of the Watch Company and CEO of their Jewelry Company to found his own company, Richard Mille.
For three years he labored, fine-tuning his designs and testing them for reliability and precision. His initial release was the RM -001, and he has followed that up with models up to the RM 016, in his mission to create “a performance timepiece... an efficient, relentless watch.”. His watches are distinctive, even to the eye. However, users have claimed that you can't really understand the appeal of a Richard Mille watch until you wear it. Mille's true gift for ergonomic design becomes most apparent when observed in practice in its intended destination: the user's wrist. Inspired by the automotive and aviation industries, Richard Mille has sought to fuse the elegance of watchmaking tradition with the hard performance requirements of mechanical construction, and the exacting requirements of a chronometer with the comfort preferences of a classic accessory. In doing so he has created pieces that, even within the high standards of the luxury timepiece industry, stand apart as unique.The Richard Mille Planetarium-Tellurium is nothing less than a planetarium for individual use. As much art as science, as much sculpture as timepiece, the Mille Planetarium-Tellurium is a desktop instrument that not only shows the time of day and the date, but the relative positions of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, and Venus. It also shows the Earth's movement around the sun in the course of a year.
Planetariums have been around since man first began to attempt to replicate the movements of the stars in the sky. Originally these constructions were massive, fixed sites such as Stonehenge, gigantic architectural devices to help man plot the movement of the stars. As time passed and technology improved, smaller and more portable mechanical devices were created. Cicero describes such an invention in his work on Archimedes. The Antikythera mechanism, a device used to calculate astronomical positions, was discovered in a wreck off the coast of Greece, and has been dated back to between 50 and 150 B.C. Originally discovered in 1901, the device's full capabilities were not known until 1959, when X-ray photographs revealed the inner mechanisms within the discolored bronze casing. A Tellurium is a mechanical three-dimensional model depicting the earth’s yearly cycle around the sun, as well as its diurnal movements and its parallelism of axis. The first Telluriums were invented in The Netherlands in the 16th Century.
It seems an unparalleled example of accuracy in precision movement. The listed error within the movement of the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, for example, is -1 degree every 2 million years
The Mille Planetarium-Tellurium is designed to be practical, easy to use, and above all, reliable. It was meant to allow for changes in time zones should the user require it, which meant that it had to be easily correctable and adjustable, while still being extremely precise once reset. To satisfy all of these requirements necessitated a lot of development time, and Mille definitely took it: the Planetarium-Tellurium took eight years for him to create
The Planetarium-Tellurium is wound with a lever system, and has a power reserve of 15 days. It has a perpetual calendar, the first ever included in a planetarium, which has a rapid corrector built into it. The rapid corrector allows for correction either forwards or backwards. (This seemingly simple bit of work took a great deal of research into mechanical engineering, because it is linked to the entire system which also accounts for local time, and summer and winter variations, relating to the axial tilting. Mille had to consult a specialist in watchmaking and astronomy). For the basic movement of the device, it uses a detent escapement. The winding spring is a Tensator type spring, providing a more consistent torque, which, when dealing with the levels of precision and consistency required to accurately reproduce planetary movement, is vital.