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The Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie

Published: 16 January 2013

 

The Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie

21st-25th January 2013

In more than twenty Shows, the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) has confirmed it is a landmark event for the Fine Watch sector.

The SIHH is where brands premiere their latest watches, the result of often years of intensive research. The SIHH is also where watchmakers and designers, the representatives of an entire creative team, share their passion for watchmaking one-to-one.

The SIHH is a private event for professionals who have been invited by the exhibiting brands.

SIHH website

4th Forum de la Haute Horlogerie - Time is a treasure to be shared

Published: 4 December 2012

The Forum de la Haute Horlogerie, which held its fourth edition in Lausanne on November 14th, is an annual event that succeeds in conquering the scepticism and disinterest of "matter-of-fact" individuals to reach those who still know how to keep business prospering.

Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot that "lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man." In other words, business has always been seen as the preserve of individuals bereft of creativity, of the originality that brings authenticity and the ability to innovate, and which is characteristic, for example, of the arts.

Such a supremely nihilistic affirmation confirms the Russian genius' intuition: that business is business, a locked-in world that leaves no room whatsoever for expectation, instinct or impulsiveness. 

Read the focus on the HH Magazine

Jouez avec le Figaro.fr et la Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie

Published: 1 November 2012

 

Le Figaro.fr et la Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie s'associent pour vous offrir des places dans les ateliers d'initiation à l'horlogerie au salon Belles Montres ainsi que des livres La Conquête du Temps !

Cliquez sur jeu-concours pour participer !

HH Magazine : When watchmaking goes for gold

Published: 22 August 2012

     

When watchmaking goes for gold

Ever since sport became focused on setting new records, timing athletes' performance has become central to every discipline. These same athletes are now among the leading brand ambassadors, as the 2012 Olympic Games in London demonstrate.

HH Magazine special focus : "When watchmaking goes for gold"

Gone are the days when the Greek wrestler (pankration) Milo of Croton shone at the Olympic, Pythian or Nemian Games in the sixth century BC. There were no records to beat, simply a ritual, even religiously inspired activity that was also a means of training warriors at a time when the City-States were locked in intestine war. Indeed, hostilities would cease during the games so that athletes could measure themselves fairly against their opponents. But when the English upper classes turned their attention to sporting events during the Industrial Revolution, the emphasis shifted to performance.

In the words of the historian Philippe Liotard, "the body became a machine that must constantly surpass itself." "Confrontation between individuals, until then the main emphasis of sport, was supplanted by the desire for better performances, paving the way for chronometry," writes Dominique Fléchon, historian and expert with the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie. "Sport and watchmaking are two forms of expression governed by precise, considered, but also adaptable rules. Precision, perfection, elegance, beauty, purity quality and exclusivity are the values common to sport and to fine watchmaking. Both are synonymous with excellence."

Destined to meet

This new philosophy was embodied in the Olympic motto, coined by Pierre de Fredy, Baron de Coubertin, in June 1894: citius, altius, fortius, faster, higher, stronger, an incitation for athletes to strive for ever greater achievement. Yet without the efforts of watchmakers, who for two centuries have pushed back the limits of their own discipline, these would have been empty words. The first timepiece showing deadbeat or independent seconds was made in 1720, the work of English astronomer and clockmaker George Graham. He built a pendulum device which divided the second into four jumps. A century later, Abraham-Louis Breguet perfected the first double seconds chronograph, closely followed by Nicolas Rieussec who in 1821 presented a watch movement driving two enamel dials, one marked with seconds and one with minutes. An ink-filled hand left dots on the dials when actuated by means of a pusher. Henceforth, sport and timekeeping would tread a common path leading to new exploits for both.

For this year's Olympic Games in London, Omega will deploy 420 tons of equipment and a team of 450 professionals, seconded by a contingent of trained volunteers. Timekeeping technology for the London Games will be precise to a mindblowing one-millionth of a second. By way of comparison, at the Los Angeles Games in 1932, the first time the International Olympic Committee appointed a single official timekeeper for all events, Omega supplied 30 stopwatches measuring 1/10th of a second. They were connected to cameras. The brand's American representative in New York took the train to Los Angeles to deliver them himself. Before then, Olympic times had been recorded to 1/5th of a second, principally by Heuer stopwatches.

Global exposure

Companies including Longines, Heuer, Omega, Seiko, Swatch and Swiss Timing, a Swatch Group subsidiary, have battled it out for the enviable status of official timekeeper of the Olympic Games and the global exposure that goes with it. Hence why London 2012 is of such vital importance to Omega. "The London 1948 Olympic Games ushered in the era of modern sports timekeeping," comments Stephen Urquhart, Omega President. "No other city in the world could offer such an impressive combination of historic and contemporary locations for the Games. Being the official timekeeper quite clearly involves a huge effort, and it's an effort which is constantly ongoing. We are already preparing for the Winter Olympics and for Rio in 2016. But it is image-boosting, brings us absolutely incredible exposure and connects us with an event that, in recent times, has once again become very positive now that problems such as doping scandals and boycotting seem to be a thing of the past."

It's hardly surprising, then, that so many athletes should wear the colours of different watch brands. The television commercial which Omega has released for London 2012 is a case in point. It showcases Chinese diver Qiu Bo, US swimmer Natalie Coughlin, British heptathlete Jessica Ennis, US sprinter Tyson Gay, South African swimmer Chad Le Clos, and US pole vaulter Jenn Suhr, all Omega ambassadors and all competing in their event in London. Meanwhile, we can expect to see Rafael Nadal wearing his Richard Mille RM027 Tourbillon and Ben Ainslie his Corum Admiral's Cup Tides. As for triple gold medallist Usain Bolt, while he might not keep his Hublot King Power on his wrist when competing, it will certainly grab its share of attention off the track. The race to come first isn't only taking place in the stadiums.

HH Magazine Rousseau Special Focus

Published: 20 June 2012

Rousseau and the mechanisms of politics

The 300th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which Geneva celebrates this year, is a chance to reflect on history. Indeed, the eighteenth century saw the city rise to prominence as a centre for watchmaking, which goes some way to explaining the philosopher's ideas.

HH Magazine Rousseau's Special Focus

In 2009, Geneva commemorated 500 years since the birth of John Calvin (1509-1564), the French theologian and principle figure of the Protestant Reformation whose teachings were instrumental to the development of watchmaking in his adoptive city. Three years later, another famous son gives Geneva cause to celebrate, namely Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The anniversary of his birth in 1712 gives the lakeside city ample pretext to pay a twelve-month tribute to the multiple talents of the writer, philosopher and composer who made his mark on the very foundations of the Republic.

A long line of watchmakers

Calvin had a direct influence on watchmaking in Geneva when he forbade the making of "crucifixes, chalices and other instruments serving papacy and idolatry" and in doing so forced goldsmiths to find new employment. Not so Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, the influence of a family of watchmakers and an environment whose activity revolved around the measurement of time was bound to shape his way of thinking. References to horology in Rousseau's writings are far from explicit, yet sufficiently perceptible for certain authors to have ventured bold comparisons.

Born, then, in Geneva in 1712, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the son of Isaac Rousseau (1672-1747), a master watchmaker like his father, David Rousseau (1641-1738), and grandfather, Jean Rousseau (1606-1684), before him. Had he embraced their profession, Jean-Jacques would have been the fourth generation of a dynasty of horologists. The future philosopher's mother, Suzanne Bernard (1673-1712), who died just days after his birth, was herself a watchmaker's daughter. Jean-Jacques spent much of the first ten years of his life in his father's workshop; a father who had returned to Geneva after six years in Constantinople as "watchmaker to the Seraglio" at the service of the Sultan in Topkapi Palace, a high-ranking function given the importance of prayer times. These ten carefree years would come to an end when Jean-Jacques' father, who was embroiled in a legal quarrel, fled Geneva. Father and son would barely see each other again.

The city's busy Fabrique

Outside the workshop, where his occupations were reading both ancient and modern authors, among them Plutarch, Ovid and Molière, and the violin which his father, an accomplished musician, played, the young Jean-Jacques grew up in a thriving city. During the eighteenth century, the Geneva Fabrique, a vast corporation of watchmakers, goldsmiths, jewellers and others whose business was the measurement of time, had spread along the right bank of the Rhone to become one of the world's foremost centres for watchmaking. Geneva was a vast atelier populated by cabinotiers, an aristocracy above the city's other craftsmen. In a single century, its annual production of timepieces increased from some five thousand to forty thousand gold watches and forty-five thousand silver watches on the eve of the French Revolution.

"Geneva's most flourishing manufacture is watchmaking. It employs more than five thousand people, which is over one fifth of the citizens", wrote Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encyclopaedia of 1757, which includes several entries on the technical aspects of time measurement by a certain Jean Romilly (1714-1796), to whom we owe numerous advances in watchmaking and a dissertation on the watch escapement, presented to the Academy of Science in 1754. A close friend of Rousseau, the two men kept up a lifelong correspondence.

Rousseau sells his watch

What can explain that Rousseau, steeped as he was in this "horological culture", in 1751 gave up "laced clothes and white stockings", laid aside his sword and sold his watch, as he explains in his Confessions. Frédéric Lefebvre, a specialist on Rousseau, sees no contradiction with the philosopher's ideas. "Rousseau is not interested in the function of the watch but he appreciates its principle, the regularity which, for him, is the image of wisdom, happiness and self-control", he writes in La Revue, the journal of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. "Here we find a metaphor that was very popular at the time, comparing the universe, man or society to a watch, because they are all made up of interdependent elements. The watch is one of the great adventures of the eighteenth century, and not only a technical exploit. The watch belongs to the history of political ideas, to the history of the Social Contract."

The theory of government in Rousseau's seminal work, suggests Lefebvre, is in fact a synthesis of two historic milestones: the institutions of Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace, and the watch with a regulating balance spring, an invention of the late seventeenth century. The will of the sovereign people is the regulator; the government - a "minister" of the sovereign whose power is the "public power concentrated therein" - is the gear train; and the State is the mainspring. Writes Lefebvre: "Just as the escapement in a watch is both "retarding" and "regulating", brake and rhythm, it is the combined effect of the "conflict" and the "participation" of the general will and of the government that leads to "the running of the political machine." All that remains is to see in the "legislator" the figure of the master clockmaker who makes the plans for the watches and clocks." As for the vicissitudes of History, they are the result of frictions which the watch mechanisms of the day had yet to overcome, as Jean Romilly readily acknowledged. Rousseau, a new figure in the history of time measurement?

HH Magazine Spécial Focus SIHH 2012

Published: 10 January 2012

HH Magazine Special Issue for the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie

The HH Magazine Spécial Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie Special Issue

For the 2012 Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH), taking place January 16th to 20th in Geneva, HH Magazine invites you to be part of the action at this exclusive event with a special issue, online and on iPad.

In-depth articles, presentations of new products, interviews with industry insiders, opinion pieces, videos, backstage and red carpet… join the team at HH Magazine for this packed week that dictates the trends for the horological year to come.

With its 18 exhibiting brands, this 22nd Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie will, as always, be a week of surprises, impromptu visits by brand ambassadors, major breakthroughs in watch complications, and stunning examples of the profession's métiers d'arts. All brought to you live by HH Magazine, the online magazine of the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie.

Share with us the excitement of the SIHH 2012 with its many marvels, possibilities and timepieces that are made for eternity.

Best Wishes

Published: 4 January 2012