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Richard S. Cunanan

Master Of Magnetism

Christophe Claret gives you a watch that reaches as far backward as it does forward.

Christophe Claret is releasing a limited edition watch whose technological innovation makes you rethink the relationship between mechanical watches and magnetism, while at the same time using steel that hearkens back to the days of the Crusades.

The Christophe Claret X-Treme 1 first came out four years ago, and the brand has decided to extend the collection by adding a pair of watches in an extremely limited edition. Each of the two watches will be available in eight pieces. The two new watches are functionally identical; one incorporates red gold, and the other white gold.

The X-Treme 1 is one of those watches that rewards you more the more you look at it. It’s fascinating from the very surface material all the way to the invisible fields that it uses to tell you the time.

Those fields are magnetism, by the way, and that may be the finest miracle of the Christophe Claret X-Treme 1: that it uses the traditional bane of mechanical watches to tell you what time it is. Talk about harnessing the weapons of the enemy. For hundreds of years, magnetism has been anathema to timekeeping. Magnetic fields adversely affect clockworks, throwing them off kilter. Generations of watchmakers knew this, and accepted it as gospel. Now the books are being rewritten, and the X-Treme 1 will have a chapter in them.

The watch uses magnetic fields to tell the time; if you look at the photos, it’s impossible to miss the two clear tubes running up the sides of the wristwatch. You might also notice that the center of the watch, what we traditionally call the face, has no hands. Or indeed, displays of any kind.

That’s because it’s the tubes that tell the whole story. The little spheres inside the tubes seem to float in space, unsupported. They are actually held in the correct spot by magnetic fields, and they move up and down the scales to indicate the hours and the minutes. The seconds are displayed on the tourbillon, which is placed at an angle just below the traditional face of the watch. The whole watch is curved and distinctively proportioned.

Those spheres are fascinating, though: they actually have no mechanical connection to the body of the watch. They are supported and moved entirely by magnetism. It looks like a magic trick… and in a way, it is.

Magnetism, that was once the ruin of a mechanical watch is now utilized to display the hours and minutes. The X-Treme 1 not only tolerates magnetism, it embraces it. It uses it to defy gravity, and to mark for us the passage of time.

The new X-Treme 1 watch also incorporates damascened steel. This is another fascinating aspect of the design choices, and I love that the brand can surprise me both with their technological designs and their choice of materials. Going with magnetism in a mechanical watch… that alone would have been enough to make me take notice. It’s a leap into the future. But they are also using material that has some serious history behind it.

Damascened steel may go as far back in history as 2500 BC, where it was first made in the Caucasus. It seemed to vanish from the records, the methods of making it perhaps forgotten, or lost in the political upheaval that we refer to as ‘history’ or sometimes as ‘war.’ Steel is a technology, too, though we sometimes forget that. It resurfaced around the time of the Crusades.

Damascened steel takes its name from Damascus, but that is just a name the records have given it. Christophe Claret says that this same craft has arisen in many different cultures, including the lands of Saladin and the Japanese samurai swords. It is a technique of making steel, layers of it being folding upon themselves over and over again. A finished sword blade’s sharp edge may actually be several hundreds of layers, folded and beaten. One legend tells of a sword so sharp that a warrior held a scarf in the air and touched his sword to it; the scarf fluttered to the ground, sliced in two. The swords of the Sultan Saladin were said to be of a type completely unknown to the Crusading knights. While their weapons were heavy, glittering things that could cut through a steel bar, the damascened steel of the Eastern warriors were a dull blue, slim and supple, and marked with a thousand lines. Steel layered upon steel, folded a hundred times to the thinness of an edge that could cut a scarf by touching it.

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