In Defence Of Useless Complications

There’s method in the madness behind the steeple chase for grandiose complications

- Yeo Suan Futt

There’s an arms race of sorts going on. It is one that sees watch companies cramming ever greater numbers of complications into a mechanical watch, even as the wristwatch is now being asked to do less, what with mobile phones and smart wearables picking up the time-telling role and then some, from tracking news and managing messages to monitoring one’s heartbeat.

A watch used to be an instrument for telling time; the one that told time more accurately and functioned more reliably, was the better watch. But with CEOs leading the chorus singing “the wristwatch is not for telling time but a work of kinetic art”, the field of watchmaking has truly flowered beyond traditional notions of what a timepiece is.

To tell time, a three-hand wristwatch with a date window tells us everything we need to know at the flick of the wrist. A timing bezel on top of this, like the ones seen in diver’s watches and some pilot’s, would allow for easy, rough tracking of elapsed times without the added gear works and complexity of a chronograph.

But beyond this, manufacturers have steadily added more complications, which require a different order of engineering and production. These include chronographs with separate balances that beat 10 times faster than ‘normal’; perpetual calendars that will keep the correct date into the next century; moonphase displays that deviate by a day in more than 500 years; and ever greater numbers of tourbillons spinning upon multiple axes.