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Richard S. Cunanan

Life In Nano

Greubel Forsey Nano Foudroyante

The Nano Foudroyante is based on the idea of using less energy, and less space, and thereby being able to do things both longer and more efficiently. Within the off-set monochromatic dial, things are happening at a scale that would have amazed the founders of horology – or even the watchmakers from the early 20th Century.

This is the third of Greubel Forsey’s EWT watches, or Experimental Watch Technology. They have managed amazing things, and with the Nano Foudroyante they were on the road to developing a watch with a 180-day power reserve. But their technological developments, strange but alluring, have led them to install a miniaturized Foudroyante complication.

If that term is unfamiliar, there’s a good reason. Foudroyante complications are very rarely made. Basically, they install a third hand that moves at fraction-of-a-second intervals, instead of once a second. Thus, the display on this watch makes a full revolution once every second, instead of every sixty seconds. And it’s tiny, by design. Looking at the watch you might think it odd that it has two winding crowns, but it doesn’t. That crown on the left is actually the lens, which magnifies the Nano Foudroyante display so that it can be seen by the human eye.

For Greubel Forsey, their new Nano Foudroyante wristwatch is just the latest point on a long long curve. To their minds, the entire process of timekeeping has been one of making the mechanisms less massive.

They see the progression thusly:

“The mechanical instruments from the beginnings of watchmaking were heavy and cumbersome, often housed in public or religious monuments. But as the centuries passed, these big machines got smaller and smaller, became transportable (table clocks, marine chronometers, pocket watches), and finally led to the mechanical wristwatches we have today.

The principal stages in the reduction of “format” sizes are as follows:

Turret clocks from the 14th century
Domestic clocks from the 15th century
Pocket watches from the 16th century
Wristwatches from the beginning of the 20th century
Nanomechanics from the beginning of the 21st century

Nor is this the process of diminishing returns. Despite what your instincts might tell you (“bigger is better” “the more the merrier”) the process of reduction in timekeeping mechanisms means an ever-smaller use of physical material, ever-smaller masses that need to be moved, and consequently, ever-decreasing amounts of energy that need to be expended. And the next logical step in that understanding that if you need less energy to do a thing, then you can do it for longer. Greubel Forsey’s watchmakers sought to keep on going by doing less. It’s the Zen Buddhism of watchmaking.

For Greubel Forsey, their new Nano Foudroyante wristwatch is just the latest point on This was part of Greubel Forsey’s goal, with the 180 day power reserve. But along the way they have created the Nano Foudroyate, which utilizes some of that spare energy to power a frenetic fractions-of-a-second display. The calm serenity of the offset all-white dial is counterbalanced by the relentless activity happening off to the side, literally under a microscope. Ah, well. Life at any scale, life at any speed.

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