QUANTA OF TIME

Just as hours, minutes and seconds are quanta of time, so too are days, weeks, months and years. We finally explore the story of the perpetual calendar in particular, in a year that invites such ruminations

- ASHOK SOMAN

Do you really need a watch to tell you if it is a leap year – actually, do you need any device at all for this since one only needs to be able to count to four? Alternatively, the sports-obsessed (or Omega collectors) could just go by the Olympics, although the pandemic gummed up the works for 2020. Need, of course, is a bit of a dirty word in horology but having a calendar that flawlessly tracks the days, dates, months and years – without intervention – is handy.

Of course, calling a perpetual calendar handy undersells what is effectively a high complication – the perpetual calendar is one of four peaks in haute horlogerie, the others being the tourbillon, the splitseconds chronograph and the minute repeater. Like the repeater and the chronograph, the perpetual calendar is properly useful. It is also the only complication to make what it does seem so easy. Deceptively so, with strong consequences for the uninitiated.

The reality is much more complex and nuanced with the perpetual calendar, which is also widely known by its name in French: quantième perpétuel, or QP for short. This is the most elegant acronym in watchmaking, and even lends itself to the name of a magazine, but we digress… Given that this high complication is occupying so much space this issue – and has already featured strongly this year in Spring and Festive before it – you would rightly expect a good deal of complexity. This is true even of the radically simple proposition from Ochs und Junior and we will get there, but not yet. As always, with stories such as this one, an extended introduction is called for so that you can decide how to approach it. It is also necessary because we do not claim that whatever we can squeeze into these 20 or so pages is everything you might care to know.

This means that we must explain what we are including and what is being deliberately left on the cutting room floor.

MESSY ORBITS