Baselworld 2010: TAG-Heuer
By Melvyn Teillol-Foo
[Press release material reproduced for technical references]
THE PARTY
We were intrigued to be invited to the TAG-Heuer Cocktail Reception at the VoltaHalle, which appeared to be a defunct power station on the outskirts of Basel.
Even more intriguing were these Tesla Roadsters parked in an alley behind the venue.
Jack Heuer welcomed us to the 150th anniversary party.
CEO Jean-Christophe Babin had an interesting watch on.....
Babin introduced Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, who drove a car on stage (silently). Musk sold his first company Zip2 to AltaVista for US$307 million in cash and US$34 million in stock options, aged 28 years.
Three years later his 2nd company PayPal was sold to eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock.
His 3rd company SpaceX was awarded a $1.6 billion NASA contract for 12 flights of their Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, replacing the Space Shuttle after it retires in 2010. In his spare time, he also managed to co-found the electric car company.
The choice of party venue at VoltaHalle seemed quite logical.........Volta was an early resercher in electricity.
This was the start of a 15 city world tour celebrating 150 years of the Heuer part of TAG-Heuer and also promote Green Technology.
Then, Messrs. Babin and Musk introduced a buddy from California who championed Green Technology and the reason for all the heavy security became clear…..
DeCaprio spoke about Green issues and how some companies and countries (or even US states like California) have "got it" i.e. got the message. He then asked Mr Babin to explain the new watch being presented as a Concept that evening. This was before the offical launch the next day at Baselworld 2010.
Prototype
Circe de Soleil entertained
TAG Heuer Chronograph Prowess
TAG Heuer has an enviable history of chronographs and the mastery of tiniest fractions of time. Arguably, it is the unrivalled leader in high-end chronographs; examples being the 1/100th-of-a-second Mikrograph stopwatch in 1916 to the 2006 Geneva Watchmaking Grand Prix winning Calibre 360, the first mechanical wrist chronograph to beat 360,000/hour. Today, TAG Heuer has an unparalleled line-up of 7 mechanical chronograph movements (Calibre 11 and 12 developed with Dubois-Depraz, Calibre 16 and 17 from ETA, new in-house Calibre 1887, Calibre 36 developed with Zenith, and Calibre 360).
Cal 1887
Unveiled at the McLaren Technology Centre in December 2009, the Calibre 1887 was launched as a commercial product in an all-new Carrera chronograph at Baselworld 2010. The Calibre 1887 is a modern column wheel/oscillating pinion integrated chronograph movement platform. It is developed from intellectual property elements acquired from Seiko Instruments Inc (SII), which designed and patented it as TC78 in 1997/99. Having acquired the intellectual property rights from SII, TAG Heuer has devoted the last 3 years re-engineering and redeveloping key components like the assortment bridge and the main plate, and adding major technical features such as an eccentric adjustment screw to the oscillating pinion (patented first by Edouard Heuer in 1887). TAG Heuer also partnered with 22 premium component makers (21 of them in Switzerland) to redevelop other major components such as the assortment, shock absorbers and raquetterie. Final assembly takes place in a totally new, dedicated TAG Heuer workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
The oscillating pinion, patented in 1887 by Edouard Heuer, works in tandem with the column wheel, in much the same way as an automobile transmission. The column wheel, which coordinates the start, stop and return-to-zero functions of the chronograph hand, functions like a gearbox. The smoothness and precision of its super-soft click start is a recognized element of high-end watchmaking excellence. The oscillating pinion works like a clutch. The optimized version in the Calibre 1887 enables the chronograph to start in less than 2/1,000th of a second. The Calibre 1887 is also equipped with a High Efficiency Rewinding (HER) system, acknowledged by watch experts as the world’s most efficient rewinding device because of its bidirectional automatic structure, which delivers 30% more efficiency than the traditional inversor system used in most Swiss chronographs. The HER is also famous for its superior reliability and sturdiness.
BIG NEWS
The really big news for their 150th anniversary was introduced in headlines: TAG HEUER R&D OBJECTIVES IN THE 3RD MILLENNIUM: TO PROGRESSIVELY RE-INVENT THE THREE ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF WATCHMAKING — ENERGY, TRANSMISSION AND REGULATION
Like most machines, a mechanical watch movement involves four basic operations: energy is generated, stored, transmitted and regulated. For centuries, these constants of mechanical watchmaking have been performed by three complementary blocks: a power storage system with cylindrical barrel, a transmission system with pinions and gears, and a regulation system with balance wheel, spiral hairspring and escapement.
With the TAG Heuer Monaco V4 Concept Watch, TAG Heuer substituted the traditional pinion and gear transmission with a belt-driven mechanical transmission. An award-winning BaselWorld concept watch in 2004, the Monaco V4 became a commercial reality at the end of 2009, when it was successfully launched in limited edition of 150 “Haute Horlogerie” pieces.
To mark its 150th anniversary, TAG Heuer introduced the TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept, the first-ever mechanical movement without hairspring.
Since the creation of the Galileo-inspired hairspring by Christiaan Huygens in 1675, the regulating organ of all mechanical watches has been based on a balance wheel and spiral-shaped torsion hairspring system. A coiled strip of fine metal alloy, the hairspring provides the torque necessary for the balance wheel to oscillate and regulate its frequency. Over the centuries, it has been significantly modified and improved. Charles-Edouard Guillaume (1861-1938), the son of a Swiss watchmaker, discovered new alloys (Invar and Elinvar) that significantly reduced the metal spring’s thermal sensitivity. Guillaume won the Nobel Prize for Physics for this invention in 1920.
With the challenge of temperature diminished by Guillaume’s alloys, the spiral hairspring regulation system came to dominate mechanical movement design. However, the mechanical hairspring has three serious design limitations: a mass that makes it sensitive to gravity and deforms its geometry; a material that makes it sensitive to thermal expansion; and a divergence between its geometric centre and its centre of mass. These may cause isochronal issues that can be technically and physically improved but never completely eliminated.
Overcoming the design limitations inherent in the traditional regulation system by eliminating the need for a spiral hairspring was the first challenge TAG Heuer set for itself. The second was keeping the movement 100% mechanical: conventional watchmaking wisdom has always held that a mechanical watch without spiral hairspring would necessarily require another energy source for its regulation.
In the TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept, the traditional hairspring is replaced by an “invisible” or virtual spring derived from magnets. The complete device forms a harmonic oscillator. The magnetic field, generated by means of 4 high-performance magnets and controlled in 3D through complex geometric calculations, provides the linear restoring torque necessary for the alternative oscillations of the balance wheel. The oscillating period of the TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept is resistant to changes from perturbing forces, which is what makes it an exceptionally good timekeeping device. The movement built with this revolutionary oscillator is fully mechanical and does not contain any electronics or driven actuators. The magnets generate a constant field over decades.
TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept, the world’s first oscillator in a mechanical movement without hairspring, beats at 43,200/hour (6 Hertz) for high frequency and ultimate precision. It requires no additional components and is based on physical magnetic properties. It gets its name from an earlier Huygens creation — the pendulum clock of 1657.
TAG HEUER PENDULUM CONCEPT
The TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept not only overturns 3 centuries of conventional watchmaking tradition, it also represents in and of itself an enormous technological leap forward. In a classical spiral hairspring system, the effect of gravity due to mass is a dominant issue. With the TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept, the problem no longer even exists. There is no loss of amplitude and the movement’s frequency can be modulated on a very large spectrum of frequency without overburdening the power supply. The result is a significant increase in precision (division of time) and performance (frequency accuracy and stability).
The TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept is the first-ever magnetic oscillator without hairspring capable of providing a restoring torque comparable to that of a hairspring: the basic principle of the Swiss anchor escapement is therefore unchanged, but the absence of mass and therefore inertia allows for much larger frequencies. Theoretical precision is significantly higher as it is possible to oscillate at small angles (the elementary principle of oscillator accuracy) without altering the return torque and, especially important, without causing geometric deformations.
TAG HEUER PENDULUM CONCEPT PROJECT: 5 YEARS OF R&D EFFORT
The TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept project involved in-house TAG Heuer R&D engineers and watchmakers working in an extensive research partnership with microsystems research experts at the Integrated Actuators Laboratory (LAI), part of the Microtechnics Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).
Starting from scratch has required advanced digital simulation coupled with physical analysis (mechanics, magnetism and thermal behaviour). It took TAG Heuer’s R&D team 3 years of intensive digital 3D simulation research to precisely orient the TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept’s virtual magnetic spring. An old adversary still remains: the magnets are sensitive to temperature. The challenge facing TAG Heuer now is to discover the magnetic equivalent of invar-elinvar: to, in a sense, add Charles Edouard Guillaume’s accomplishments to those of Christiaan Huygens. Once addressed, the TAG Heuer Pendulum Concept will no longer be a concept but a new milestone in mechanical regulator technology. As with the V4, this may take years, but TAG Heuer is committed to taking on the challenge and pursuing the epic Pendulum adventure.
TAG Heuer does not claim that the Pendulum Concept will take the place of traditional, high-quality Swiss hairsprings in mainstream mechanical movements, but rather offer a “Haute Horlogerie” alternative, which could lead to high-end limited editions in the future, as was the case with the Monaco V4’s movement transmission innovations.
TAG HEUER GRAND CARRERA PENDULUM CONCEPT
The TAG Heuer Grand Carrera Pendulum Concept opens a promising new era in watchmaking, with potentially powerful new movements precise to ever-smaller fractions of time. The effect on future watches and chronographs design and function may be huge — and TAG Heuer once again leads the way even though it will take years before it will become a commercial realty. Patents have been filed and are pending.
Conclusion:
I confess to being one of the more outspoken skeptics of the V4 concept and the long wait for execution only served to stiffen my belief. However, I can also admit that the Pendulum Concept really blew my mind because it works and from a simple idea. It may take time to develop but the concept is admirable. If Guillaume won the Nobel Prize for cobbling together a couple of metal alloys, then Tag-Heuer should win the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for the Pendulum Concept.