In the spirit of Breguet’s inspiration of more than 220 years ago, URWERK has designed and is producing the very first master-slave clock and wristwatch, in which an atomic clock, via a complex mechanical linkage, duplicates all of the functions of Breguet’s most advanced sympathique clocks in one device: it winds, sets, and regulates an URWERK watch, which rests in a cradle in the case of the atomic clock itself. Both the atomic master clock and the watch have been specially designed for the AMC project, and together they represent the first time that a mechanical watch and an atomic clock have been created to perform these three operations, via mechanical linkages, on a purely mechanical watch.
The atomic master clock component of the URWERK AMC is in an enclosure measuring 45cm x 30cm x 18cm; it weighs approximately 35 kilos and the case is solid aluminum. The clock, developed in collaboration with TimeStandard, is a dual oscillator type, using ions of YIG (yttrium iron garnet) and rubidium, and has been engineered so as to allow it to be adaptable to any voltage, so that it can be used worldwide (at any voltage, from 90 to 240 volts). A portable atomic clock must contend with factors ranging from temperature change to variations in power supply, and aging of the atomic timing package itself. Even with all of these potential disturbances, however, the AMC atomic clock will keep nearly perfect time – guaranteed to within one second in 317 years.
Watches
AlTiN, Titanium
40mm
Black
Hours, Minutes, Power Reserve, Seconds
Automatic
Fabric
“We began essentially as a core group of artists who wanted to interpret time differently. We were not businessmen. It was extremely risky because we had no idea how our watches would be accepted.”
A new perspective to Haute Horlogerie Founded in 1997 by Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei, URWERK is the result of a strongly held be-lief that the history of Fine Watchmaking is a constantly changing art. Felix Baumgartner, a watchmaker like his father and grandfather, has time running through his veins. A graduate from the Schaffhausen watchmaking school, Felix learned the secret language of minute-repeaters, tourbillons and perpetual calendars at his father’s bench. Martin Frei is the artistic counterweight to his partner’s technical expertise. Accepted into the Lucerne’s college of art and design in 1987, Martin delved into every form of visual artistic expression from painting and sculpture to video, emerging as a mature artist. | The two men met by chance and discovered a common fascination with the measurement of time, spending hours analysing the gap between the watches they saw in the shops and the vision of their future creation. The wandering hour has since formed the basis for URWERK’s astonishing 103 watch and the latest models, the UR-105 TA and the UR-210. They all feature highly original design, advanced watchmaking techniques and new concepts. URWERK means “original accomplishment,” and Ur of the Chaldees, in Mesopotamia, is where the Sumeri-ans first observed the concurrence of the heavenly bodies with the seasons, and so developed the first measurements of time.
Have a question?
