H. Moser & Cie Introduces A Smoked Salmon Sports Watch, CODE41 Brings Us a More Accessible Tourbillon and Armin Strom’s Co-founder Talks Physics Of Watchmaking

Hey friends, watch brands are still taking a day or week off, so there’s not much going on. But don’t worry, It’s About Time has you covered - even when there’s no news, we find a way to get you up to speed on the watch world. Even if we have to dig up a 70 year old story.

In this issue:

• A new and beautiful H. Moser

• A more accessible tourbillon from CODE41

• Armin Strom’s Co-founder On The Physics Of Watchmaking

• The Quartz Crisis wasn’t solely to blame for the industry downfall

Today’s reading time: 5 minutes and 12 seconds

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👂What’s new

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H. Moser & Cie Introduces The Streamliner Centre Seconds Smoked Salmon

The Streamliner collection was introduced in 2020 as H. Moser & Cie’s take on the integrated bracelet luxury sports watch. And boy was it a take. The watches in the collection retained Moser’s signature minimalism while still being supremely cool. Now they’re introducing a new variant of the Centre Seconds model with a new "Smoked Salmon" fumé dial. This will be a special edition, available for one year only.

The Streamliner Centre Seconds is the most elemental or straightforward model in this family, offering hours, minutes and central seconds. Moser’s characteristic minimalism is at play here, and the beauty of the fumé griffé dial (gradient with an emphatic vertical brushed finishing) is the true star of the show. Similar to the Matrix Green Streamliner Centre Seconds of 2020, nicknamed the ‘Green Dragon’ by fans, this is the second colour to appear on board this three-hand model.

The 40mm rounded cushion case in stainless steel features a matte satin-brushed finish. The height of the case is 10.3mm without the domed sapphire crystal and 12.1mm with the crystal. Inside is the calibre HMC 200 is an automatic movement with a bidirectional pawl-winding system and an original Straumann Hairspring with a flat overcoil (made by Moser’s sister company Precision Engineering AG)

The retail price is CHF 19,900 (incl. tax) – for more information.

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CODE41 Unveils The T360, A More Accessible Tourbillon

Ever since A. L. Breguet invented the tourbillon to counteract the negative effects of gravity on a watch, the tourbillon has become one of the grail complications on a watch alongside the perpetual calendar and the rattrapante chronograph. Many brands have implemented tourbillons into their watches at many price points, but most of them skew towards the higher end of of the price point.

CODE41 is a relatively young brand that, like so many before it, want to “disrupt the industry”. We’ll wait and see if they will do it, but in the meantime they unveiled the T360 Tourbillon - a watch with a tourbillon movement developed, designed and assembled entirely in Switzerland, priced below the 10k mark.

As they have done with their previous watches, CODE41 put to a vote to their fans what watch they would like to see next and the choice was a tourbillon. What’s interesting is that every single decision about the watch was put to the public vote, so the brand ended up with a fully Swiss developed movement. This does not, of course, they developed it in house, but rather worked with a number of very well known companies - Atokalpa (Balance wheel, lever escapement, escape wheel), KIF (shock absorber), BCP Tourbillon (movement design), or Orimpex (Assembly of the movement and casing).

The case is made out of titanium and measures 42mm in diameter, and there is a choice. Not a choice of color, but of the look of the case. You can get a classic case (the so-called NativeDNA) that the brand has used previously, or you can opt for a a new case named Stratom - a revamped squared case, with 4 corner-placed screws. There are more available coustomizations - you can chose between 5 color combinations for the dial and hands, as well as a selection of leather or rubber straps, or steel bracelets (all 24mm in width). In total, over 200 possible combinations are available.

The CODE41 T360 Tourbillon preorders for the initial batch of 150 pieces opened yesterday and the price starts at CHF 9,898, EUR 10,998 or USD 9,598 (for the NativeDNA case with leather strap).

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Armin Strom’s Co-founder Claude Greisler On The Fascinating Physics Of Watchmaking

I’ve noted several times this week that it’s been slow with news. Well, when there’s no new watches, there are still things to learn about watches. Like, for instance, how a very old physics principle helps high-end watchmakers make predictable running watches.

Monochrome watches sat down with Claude Greisler, the co-founder and Head Watchmaker at Armin Strom, one of the few brands producing resonance watches. His early background as a restorer of vintage timepieces led him to explore the history of Resonance in the context of the Longitude Problem and ultimately to develop his own line of Resonance watches under the Armin Strom brand. But before presenting one of the best and most pragmatic examples of a watch that uses resonance to improve accuracy, there was an impressive amount of research required. In the interview Greisler explains what resonance means in watchmaking.

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The Quartz Crisis wasn’t solely to blame for the industry downfall, real trouble was brewing for years

Again… no new watches… so, let’s use this opportunity to learn more about the history of watchmaking. More specifically, the dreaded quartz crisis that killed of hundreds of brands.

The history of timekeeping dates back to whenever the first creature wondered where the sun was in the sky, and the earliest evidence for calendars comes from Babylon and Egypt 5,000 years ago. In all that time, there haven’t been any horological events that are mentioned with as much dread as the Quartz Crisis. After the release of the Seiko Quartz Astron in 1969, the unstoppable force that was the Swiss watch industry was swept aside by the new generation of affordable, accurate, and battery-powered watches. Companies who had seen centuries of prosperity were bled out and bought out, occasionally to be revived as a 21st century microbrand or forgotten entirely.

However, as this great article from Time + Tide points out, the crisis is what broke the brands. But real trouble started for them much earlier.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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You can make fun of Hublot, but this eye popping $500,000 Hublot Big Bang Integrated Tourbillon Full Blue Sapphire is stunning

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Hands on with the dress watch done the Rolex way

⚙️Watch Worthy

A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like

The Grönefeld 1941 Grönograaf, The First of Its Kind From the Dutch Brothers

The Grönefeld 1941 Grönograaf is not your regular chronograph; the brothers made sure it does not appear as such, even though it is classical in every sense… Almost. It features a column wheel with lateral coupling, and it is also equipped with an ingenious mechanism to control the force with which the chronograph hands are reset, which adds value, and its action is a spectacle to watch continuously. Before we get to how it works, here is some background info.

⏲️Wait a minute

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• In May 2021, fishermen in Tobago discovered a boat filled with more than a dozen bodies. No one knew who they were; no one knew where they had come from. Over a two-year investigation, reporters at the Associated Press went looking for their identities to tell a story about lives shaped by inhumane forces and lost at sea.

• ChatGPT has given rise to a new class of worker: the overemployed. Vice verified the identities of several people who work multiple full-time jobs and use ChatGPT as a supercharged assistant to cash paycheques from multiple employers.

• Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop will go down in history as one of the most ridiculous human accomplishments of all time. But goop does not stop at just jade vagina eggs and breastmilk scented candles, or whatever it is they sell, the also have a cruise. And luck for us, a very funny writer, Lauren Oyler, went on said cruise.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

We use watches to mark special occasions in our life. Sometimes they accompany us on adventures and have great stories to tell. Is there a better story than a fire mangled Rolex Sub that tells the story of how you survived one of the most famous car crashes of our time?

💵Pre-loved precision

Buy and sell your watches. Think of this section like old school classifieds - i don’t guarantee anything except that a bunch of people will see your ad and I’ll put the buyer and seller in touch. Want to advertise your watch? Contact us 

• SOLD: Rolex Explorer I 39 mm Mark I, ref. 214270. Great condition, no box or papers. €7250, OBO. Reach out to us and we’ll put you in touch

• For sale: Longines Heritage Skin Diver, box and papers. €1400. Reach out to us and we’ll put you in touch

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