Flights Of Fancy

Jaquet Droz’s Tropical Bird Repeater is mechanical watchmaking at its most evocative

- Alvin Wong

The key to good storytelling, according to Stephen King, is ‘teleportation’. The ability to invite and immerse the reader into another world, he says, is one of the most precious gifts a storyteller can have. King ought to know. He chalked up almost US$350 million in book sales at last count.

Although we don’t like making tenuous links at this magazine, it really is kind of the same with watches. A good watch isn’t necessarily the most expensive, famous or complicated. It is one that gives you an out-of-body experience. Take away the logos, price tags, and marketing spin, a good watch, really, is one that makes you feel something beyond yourself. The joy or heartache of a memory, perhaps. Or a sense of being an elevated version of yourself. Even then, some watches go further. Like King, the best watches tell stories that take you deep within their universe. They teleport. Until one becomes not just a mere appreciator, but an active participant in a horological adventure.

When it comes to spinning a good yarn, Jaquet Droz is peerless. After all, the brand has honed its knack for telling stories for the past 280 years. It started from the time its eponymous founder would haul life-sized automatons (watch-speak for mechanical robots) that could sketch, write or play a harpsichord on travelling exhibitions. Those automatons served to evoke an otherworldly future populated by mad inventors and mechanical beings. More shrewdly, they demonstrated Droz’s genius and enticed wealthy royals to buy his timepieces.

More than two centuries on, it is still pretty much the same – only that the automatons are now way more complex, and have been miniaturised to an insane degree that they can actually fit inside a wristwatch.

Bird Song