Over time seconds become time. – Werner Mitsch

Silver men’s pocket watch with tourbillon

Company: A. Lange & Söhne, 1939

Silver men’s pocket watch with minute tourbillon and power reserve display. The company A. Lange & Söhne completed just nine of these complicated pocket watches. As well as the power reserve display, the movement offers technical masterpieces such as the fusée-and-chain transmission and the tourbillon.

The “tourbillon” (whirlwind), patented in 1801 by its inventor Abraham Louis Breguets, serves to neutralise the negative influence of gravity on the rate of watches in vertical positions. A tourbillon can largely eliminate this effect, which is caused by the balance becoming imbalanced, by not only letting the balance swing back and forth (oscillation) but also letting it rotate around its own axis, along with its bearings.