What’s in a name?
For a Tourbillon, it is a fancy, French word for “whirlwind.”
The Tourbillon was invented by 18th-century watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet, and his idea was to counter the effects of gravity on the escapement of a pocket watch.
The escapement of a watch is basically what makes the hands of a mechanical watch move and keep time.
The Tourbillon could be considered a kind of watch escapement.
The escapement regulates timekeeping in a watch (you hear this with the ticking sound), and is the most visually animated part of the movement.
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Among its primary parts are the balance wheel, which swings back and forth multiple times per second.
A Tourbillon takes this entire structure and puts it in a frame that revolves a full 360 degrees, so it’s ticking and twitching and turning all at once.
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Tourbillons are extremely complicated to produce with a lot of tiny, precise components.
The Tourbillon is revered in horology as an engineering marvel, and many modern watchmaking houses create them as a demonstration of their skills.
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They appear today in the most expensive wristwatches on Earth, although they serve no real purpose, since wristwatches naturally change position all day long.
Well-made, but entry-level watches with genuine, hand-crafted Tourbillons fetch at least $50,000 – and the really good ones start at about $250,000.
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A Tourbillon is one of the pinnacles of watchmaking achievement, and a truly impressive feat of engineering.
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CHARLEY PHOTO OF THE WEEK: A fun fact about Charley is she’ll sit by a door for a long time patiently (sometimes) waiting for someone to open it and let her through. Here, she’s waiting on the back deck for Tom to let her inside — probably because she smelled pizza.
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