Random pic 27 April 2025
'Marie-Antoinette' Breguet No. 160 watch. Originally designed by Abraham-Louis Breguet, 1783 https://flic.kr/p/2qWatt5This jewel of a timepiece was crafted from the finest materials: gold wherever possible and sapphires to reduce friction on the moving parts. However, Breguet was not choosing style over substance. His ingenious design, and the mechanical expertise of his workshop's craftsmen, enabled the watch to be packed with many impressive functions, each known as a 'complication'. Over the more than 40 years it was being worked on, Breguet continued to add new complications as he developed them.Among the watch's 823 parts, Breguet included mechanisms which perform a range of functions beyond the telling of time in hours, minutes.and seconds. These include:
• Pare-chute' shock absorber
• Self-winding mechanism
• 48-hour power reserve indicator
• Minute repeater sounding a sequence of hour, quarter hour and minute
• Independent second hand - acting as a stopwatch
• Calendar for date, day and month - corrected to account for leap years
• Equation-of-time indicator
in minutes
• Bimetallic thermometeIn 1783 the clockmaker Abraham-Louis
Breguet was given an unlimited budget to craft an exceptional timepiece for Queen Marie-Antoinette. Although no records confirm this, it may have been commissioned by the Swedish soldier-diplomat Axel von Fersen a close friend of the queen.A Labour of Love:The timepiece would exceed all others in beauty and complexity, becoming Breguet's masterpiece. In his pursuit of perfection, and interrupted by the French Revolution, the watch was not completed until the 1820s, long after Marie-Antoinette's death in 1793.At the London Science Muuseum, Versailles Science and Splendour Exhibition(Lent by The L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem, Israel Loan no. L2024-129 Images Avshalom Avital)[Text from Science Museum Exhibition Label]
Michael Ixer ● 95d1 Comments