The Legend of Franck Muller - Westime

THE COLOSSUS OF GENTHOUD
BY WEI KOH
Alexander the Great had conquered most of the
known world when he was prematurely felled by
fever. Following his death, his three greatest
generals Ptolemy, Seleucus and Antigous warred
for control of his kingdom. The city of Rhodes,
one of the world’s most important ports situated
where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Aegean,
sided with Ptolemy. Enraged, Antigous dispatched
his son Demetrius with an army numbering
40,000 and a metal armada of war machines
unlike any the world had ever seen. Their mission:
bring Rhodes to its knees. Demetrius attacked
using vast towers 150-feet high which were
supported by six ships and could be rolled onto
land by virtue of their enormous iron wheels. Yet
for over one year, he could not conquer Rhodes.
When he left, the citizens of Rhodes gathered up
his discarded siege engines to create a statue
honoring their patron god, Helios. The resulting
statue was 110-feet high and stood on a 50-foot
pedestal and towered over the harbor of Rhodes
as a testament to the city’s resilience and courage.
Dubbed “The Colossus of Rhodes”, the statue
was so vast that it was said to have blocked out the
sun and was considered one of the Seven Wonders
of the Ancient World.
In the 11th year of the third millennium, Franck
Muller Watchland has unveiled what is destined
to become known as the “The Colossus of
Genthod”, a watch that is a living testament to the
courage, daring and technical might of the
contemporary’s world’s foremost and most
successful independent watchmaker.
That Franck Muller Watchland should write
this new chapter in the history and evolution of
the tourbillon is fitting, considering the
manufacture’s pioneering role in reintroducing
Abraham-Louis Breguet’s signature complication
to watch lovers worldwide. Add to this that, in
2003, through the collaboration of two of haute
horlogerie’s brightest minds, Pierre-Michel
Golay and Franck Muller, the world’s most
revolutionary timepiece — the first commercially
produced, multiple-axis tourbillon known as
Revolution 2 — was brought into the world, and
the creation of new Giga Tourbillon seems nothing
less than the brand’s manifest destiny.
Says Vartan Sirmakes, Watchland’s co-founder
and the man who created the underlying industrial
might, “Franck Muller Watchland was the first to
offer wristwatch tourbillons to the modern
consumer. We also created an entre new era for
the tourbillon when we introduced Revolution 2,
Revolution 3 and Evolution 3-1, the world’s first
dual- and triple-axis tourbillons. In each
instance, the resulting watch came from our
ambition to bring meaningful evolution to the
tourbillon. As such, I very much feel as if the
tourbillon complication is a fundamental part of
our DNA. This year, you will see two totally
groundbreaking tourbillons from Franck Muller
Watchland that will assert our position as the
‘King of Tourbillons’.”
What exactly is the big news related to the Giga
Tourbillon? The answer to this question becomes
stridently obvious when you strap the watch’s
substantial but totally ergonomic case, measuring
59.2mm × 43.7mm, to your wrist. The entire
bottom half of the watch is dominated by a
tourbillon regulator so vast that the arms of its
cage threaten to block out the rays of the sun.
Says Sirmakes, “Every time I looked at a
tourbillon, the one thing I wished was that I could
see more of the mechanism. It was for this reason
that we invented the Revolution 1 Tourbillon
where the regulator literally rose up out of the
dial. But this time, when I posed the challenge to
my team, our technical director Jean-Pierre
Golay came back to me with the response,
‘We have an idea for a tourbillon with
unparallel visibility, with a cage and tourbillon
so vast that they should belong in an
ancient marine chronometer.’”
You can literally imagine gravity, which the
tourbillon was created to defeat, whimpering like
a scared dog in deference to the sheer
monumentality of the Giga Tourbillon’s 20mmdiameter
cage. Oscillating within this cage is a
golden behemoth of a balance wheel measuring
16mm in diameter.
Says the brilliant Jean-Pierre Golay, cousin to
the legendary Pierre-Michel Golay and
Watchland’s all-round technical guru, “This
balance wheel was optimized to have the maximum
inertia but with the minimum weight, so that it
would not consume too much power, which
means that the majority of its weight was poised to
the outside of the wheel.”
Golay continues, “We made great efforts to
lighten everything very substantially. The entire
cage is made from titanium. The balance wheel
is made from bronze barium, but it is very, very
thin. We are really at the limit of what we are
capable of creating, even with the most
advanced technology possible.”
If you wish to be impressed by how every hint
of excess material has been pared from the cage,
simply let your eyes be drawn to the points of
the skeletonized “M” integrated into its design.
These points are so sharp, they appear as if
in an act of Euclidean magic to extend
infinitely into space.
What has made the critical difference in Franck
Muller Watchland and its ability to produce
groundbreaking timepieces such as the Giga
Tourbillon is Vartan Sirmakes’ insistence on
pouring huge investments into the creation of
some of the most sophisticated in-house
manufacturing facilities in all of horology. For
example, the balance wheel and tourbillon cage of
the Giga Tourbillon are created at FHH
[Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie] in Meyrin, a
subsidiary of Watchland, and overseen by none
other than the peerless Jean-Pierre Golay.
Jean-Pierre explains, “These tiny parts are
created using wire erosion. But because we are
dealing with unknowns, there is always a learning
curve for the watchmakers during assembly. For
example, because of how thin the balance wheel