Time And Tide

Breguet’s new Marine Équation Marchante 5887 makes you question the very nature of time itself, writes Nicolette Wong.

- Nicolette Wong

Your wristwatch is inaccurate—that is the unfortunate reality that most mechanical watch wearers have come to terms with as even the most accurate of watches are certified to be within a few seconds of the exact time. But I wear a smartwatch, you say, there is no way it is inaccurate. Well, that depends on what you want to use to define the “exact time”.

When we talk about time in today’s context, we are talking about civil time, also known as mean solar time, which is the universal standard by which time is measured. There exists, however, a few other times that are not used regularly, true solar time for example. This is the measurement of the hour according to the movement of the sun—and no, it is not the same as civil time.

What is the difference? Is there a watch that can accurately tell the time? Breguet attempts to answer these exact questions with its new Marine Équation Marchante 5887, which features one of the watch world’s most mysterious and rare complications known as the equation of time or équation marchante in French. As mentioned before, we normally imagine time to be an immutable and exact measurement of human existence, but the fact remains that there is more than one way to measure the passage of time. The most accurate among them is International Atomic Time, which uses atomic clocks to measure the precise length of a second, and where the level of inaccuracy is about 1sec in 100 million years.