Первая турбина от JLC

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With Jaeger-LeCoultre In Switzerland: The Very First Tourbillons Of JLC

The tourbillon hasn't exactly become ubiquitous, but there's an argument to be made that it may be, just a bit, a victim of its own success. To put it more exactly, the tourbillon may be a victim of the success of modern precision manufacturing methods, which have made it possible to produce tourbillon wristwatches that can be priced almost unbelievably inexpensively, relative to the prices the complication used to command. However, if there is one almost universally valid truism in mechanical horology nowadays, it's that it's not so much what you do as how you do it, and how Jaeger-LeCoultre did tourbillons – and continues to do them – is a microcosm of the evolution of the tourbillon, and the hopes we might have for its future. On last week's visit to the Jaeger-LeCoultre manufacture in Le Sentier, we got a chance to look deeper than usual into what the tourbillon meant, and could mean in years to come.
Jaeger-LeCoultre's collections of its own work are very extensive, and while we saw (and will share with you) many of the treasures they keep under lock and key, the pocket watch and wristwatch you'll see here are especially interesting.

The pocket watch you see above is one of a series of 26, produced between 1946 and 1954. Cosmetically, it's almost completely uninteresting and at first glance, if you spotted it in a flea market tray you'd probably pass it by in favor of – well, almost anything else, especially if you were mostly interested in wristwatches, which most people are. It would be a shame, though. This particular pocket watch houses the caliber 170, 49.72 mm in diameter, and the movement was the very first tourbillon Jaeger-LeCoultre ever made. It was not intended for sale; the caliber 170 was made to compete in the observatory chronometry trials, and it's very likely that as much effort (at least) was expended on adjusting it as was expended in making it.

Maybe I've been too hard on the dial side of this watch, but it would be extremely hard to beat the view through the back of the movement; if there were ever a contest for the ultimate business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back watch, it might be this one. The balance is bimetallic, and looks to be of the type known as a Guillaume balance. The Guillaume balance is named for its inventor, Charles Guillaume, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920 for his work on steel and nickel alloys that have the ability to remain dimensionally and elastically stable over a wide range of temperatures. The discovery of these alloys revolutionized watchmaking; the Guillaume balance, in combination with a blued steel balance spring, was intended to eliminate something called middle temperature error, which was the basic flaw in the steel and brass compensating balance.

Though conventional compensating balances could work extremely well and give watches and chronometers very stable rates, they weren't perfect. Exact compensation for temperature-related changes in the elasticity of the steel balance spring only occurs at the relative high and low temperature extremes, because the change in balance effective diameter (due to the bimetallic nature of the balance) is linear, and the change in spring elasticity isn't. In a pocket watch, which lives in a fairly narrow temperature range, the error is small, but for the purposes of the observatory trials the idea was to go to war with as much ammo as possible, and so the Guillaume balance – which uses an alloy called Anibal rather than steel, and provides near-perfect elimination of middle temperature error – was sometimes used. It doesn't hurt that this is also an extraordinarily beautifully made machine, with all the unostentatious but near-flawless craft in finishing lavished on it you could possibly hope for. The finish is some of the purest I've ever seen, and it's clearly not intended to sucker anyone into buying the watch, but rather, is an expression of integrity in its creation.

It wasn't until 1993 that Jaeger-LeCoultre made its very first wristwatch tourbillon, and interestingly enough, they built it in a Reverso case. (Also interestingly, this was the same year in which LMH – Les Manufactures Horlogères SA – which owned Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC, and A. Lange & Söhne, was acquired by Mannesmann AG, which would go on to sell LMH to the Richemont Group in 2000.) The movement was the Jaeger-LeCoultre caliber 828: 28.8 mm x 23.2 mm x 4.79 mm, beating at 21,600 vph (vibrations per hour) and with small seconds and power reserve indication. The tourbillon rotates once per minute and the small seconds hand is mounted on the axis of the tourbillon cage.

The shift from the sheer massiveness and obvious singleness of purpose of the observatory pocket watch to the elegance and deliberate, rather than serendipitous, visual beauty of the the Reverso Tourbillon, signals an historically significant shift in the role of the tourbillon; the latter was made as a declaration of technical virtuosity, of course (wristwatch tourbillons at the time Jaeger-LeCoultre began producing the caliber 828 were still very rare) but it was also an indication of the change in emphasis in the tourbillon's role. No longer just a regulating device (albeit an extremely challenging one to make and regulate) it had begun to be, by 1993, an added inducement to connoisseurs and collectors, who were not necessarily primarily interested in horology or accuracy per se.

However, one thing about which Jaeger-LeCoultre has made very specific assertions in their recent construction of tourbillons – across the board, from the Master Tourbillon to the Reverso Tribute Gyrotourbillon – is that they're striving not only for visual effect, but also for improvements in chronometry. In our next installment from our visit to Jaeger-LeCoultre in Le Sentier, we'll look at some of the more exotic modern tourbillons the manufacture creates.

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https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/th...irst-wristwatc