This morning Mark Zuckerberg posted an announcement on Instagram about the end of META Fact Checks and changes to content censorship through META properties. The watch that he was wearing was a Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 worth close to one million dollars. The Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 is one of the few watches made by hand in almost its entirety. With 95% of this timepiece —including the hairspring— made using only hand-operated tools, one single timepiece requires an extraordinary 6,000 hours of work —equal to three years of man-hours.
Photo of Mark Zuckerberg from FB
The Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 takes traditional watchmaking to a new unprecedented summit. Never before has a hand-made timepiece exhibited such a high level of workmanship and precision. This timepiece, unique in the history of watchmaking, is the fruit of a technical and human endeavor of epic proportions, enlisting extraordinary talents and setting the course for the future. A handmade watch requires to be made mostly by hand or utilizing processes that are hand operated, I’d say to at least 70%.
Only two or three timepieces per year of the Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 are made and destined to become a new watchmaking landmark that unites both the past and future. This new step towards the summit in the finest of craftsmanship is substantiated on the dial at 6 o’clock, where the inscription HAND MADE replaces the usual SWISS MADE.
The Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 is based on the Naissance d’une Montre 1 Project led by the Time Aeon Foundation and Philippe Dufour is the best example of a handmade watch using ancient horological tools and hand-operated processes. Officially started in 2011 and presented at the SIHH 2014 in Geneva as a concept, the Le Garde Temps Naissance d'une Montre is a timepiece fully made by hand following traditional and historical watchmaking techniques. The first prototype of this exceptional timepiece sold for USD 1.46 Million at the Christie’s Important Watches auction in Hong Kong.
Following the roadmap of the Le Garde Temps Naissance d'une Montre, the Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 has been entirely created from scratch including the movement construction, traditional machining, and hand-finishing for each of the 272 movement components and 36 case parts —308 components. Finally, an entirely handmade timepiece, from the movement to the case to the leather strap, the dial, and the hands —the only exceptions being the sapphire crystals, the case gaskets, the spring bars, the jewels, and the mainspring.
To achieve the 95% handmade level with such a high standard of excellence and obtain the 308 components of the Hand Made 1 respecting Greubel Forsey criteria, over 800 individual parts had to be made. It took almost 35 times longer to make the complete tourbillon cage than for a standard high-end tourbillon. When just a dozen operations on an automatic lathe effortlessly yield some 500 screws, a single screw, as small as it may be, required up to 12 individual operations taking up to 8 hours to make just one. Finally, to hand make one wheel of the Hand Made 1, took 600 times longer than that of a high-end industrial wheel.
In my book, I consider a handmade watch one where all the movement’s components are of course hand finished true to the finest watchmaking tradition, including the bridges with their polished inner and outer vertical flanks, the mainplate, and the wheels with hand-polished bevels top and bottom. Therefore, most independent watch brands meet these criteria, but of course some more than others.
The Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 is the new standard as far as handmade watches using hand-operated machines, but the majority of the independents as well as some of the oldest watch brands in the world follow closely.
