Just In Time For Thanksgiving, It's Five Turkeys Of Watchmaking

Now, if we're talking about something that's a real turkey, we need to say what that means. "Turkey" in American slang usually means something which is, for lack of a better word, not only bad, but really bad. We're not talking merely mediocre, or thoughtless, or lacking in imagination, or even tasteless. What's tasteless, after all, is very different from one person to the next and there are entire brands which do very well, year after year, making watches that one person thinks are tasteless, but which have found an audience, nonetheless. You can express all the disgust at the brand, its philosophy, and its products that you want but this is merely to say that one man's poison is another man's pleasure.

No, for something to be a real turkey, I think it has to be so ill-conceived as to defy reason and logic. A lot of the time, this happens because a company or its leadership start doing what they think they should do instead of what actually makes sense for them, and the result can be something extremely jarring. It helps drive the coffin nail home if the turkey in question is also absurd from a mechanical and engineering standpoint, but you can definitely hatch a turkey just by making the mistake of taking a focus group or two without a grain of salt. Oddly enough, turkeys seem to appear more often during boom times, when the thought of all that money floating around gets brands thinking more about how to scoop up as much of it as possible, than how to make good watches.

Going after short money by following fads can pay off for a year or two, but it can also leave you with a bunch of leftovers you can't sell, and an alienated customer base that wonders what the hell you thought you were doing. That prices usually shoot up at the same time a brand is wandering further and further from its own identity doesn't help either.

By the way, it goes without saying (or at least I think it does) that this list is both necessarily incomplete, and highly personal. There have been a lot more than five, and everyone's list will be different – the flock is large. 

So: weirdly ill-conceived mechanically, badly off-brand aesthetically, preferably inexplicably expensive, and replete with clichéd ideas that have more to do with a fast buck than making a good watch – these are all the elements that either alone, or in some combination, can thoroughly stuff a horological turkey.

This Pendulum Watch From The 1600s Is A Terrible Idea

It's maybe a little unfair of me to drag him too much for trying to put a pendulum into a pocket watch but jeez, I feel like even five minutes of common sense consideration of the idea should have made it apparent that paying attention to Huygens' other major contribution – the balance and balance spring – was a better way to go.

The pendulum works fine – better than fine, a good pendulum clock can keep time to within a few seconds a year – but that's in a stationary clock and even back in 1680, when the ink was barely dry on Huygens' Horologium Oscillatorium, it ought to have been glaringly obvious that putting a pendulum in something that's going to get bounced around in a belt pouch (this was before the advent of pockets) isn't where the smart money was.

The early years of any new technology can, of course, produce some spectacular failures. Take aviation. In 1912, a guy named Franz Reichelt jumped from the top of the Eiffel Tower in a voluminous coat of his own design, which he thought might function as a wearable escape system for flyers. Pictures from before his attempt show what looks like a three-year-old wearing an overcoat tailored for Michael Jordan – even at a glance, it doesn't look promising. As it turns out, it wasn't – Reichelt was killed testing it (why not try it out with a dummy first, you poor misguided pioneer?).

As with Reichelt's Parachute Coat, the nicest thing you can say about the pendulum watch was that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Erotic Complications Are As Sexy As A Ball Peen Hammer To The Groin

Erotic complications, in case you've never heard of the category before (and there's an excellent chance that if you came into the world of watches more recently you haven't; they're probably made significantly less often nowadays than minute repeaters) are typically pocketwatches or wristwatches that look more or less like normal watches (whatever that means) on the dial side, but which have, usually on the back and sometimes hidden under a hinged cover, a person, or persons, in some state of undress, having sex. Sometimes it's good old fashioned vanilla missionary position sex, and sometimes it's something else, but usually the figures are animated – you push a lever or a button and they begin to expressionlessly, and certainly joylessly, grind against each other like nightmare fuel versions of the animatronic characters in the "It's A Small World" ride at Disneyland.

Now I say this with no intention to impugn the Swiss national character, nor indeed the country of Switzerland as a whole. I think of it almost as my home away from home and in any given year for the last dozen at least, I've been to Geneva a lot more often than I've been to Brooklyn.

However, sexy is just not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of the most essential characteristics of Swiss craft and culture, and nowhere is this more apparent than in so-called erotic complications. Swiss watchmaking is wonderful – really wonderful – for many reasons. But there is something to be said for staying in your lane (or at the very least, knowing that lanes exist at all) and if by national character the odds are stacked against you in a particular enterprise, perhaps it is better leaving it – in this case, a celebration in art of the manifestations of Cupid and Eros – to a people and nation (and, probably, an industry)  for which it is more, shall we say, on-brand.

Even Vacheron And Piaget Couldn't Save The Jean Lassale Ultra Thin Caliber 1200

The funny thing is, there is a fine line between intense competition and thinly veiled desperation, and one company that straddled the line was Jean Lassale. The company was founded to produce two ultra-thin movements – the hand-wound caliber 1200 and the automatic caliber 2000 – which were created by a watchmaker named Pierre Mathys. Their dimensions would have been headline-grabbing even today. The hand-wound caliber 1200 was just 1.2mm thick, and used, as part of its innovations for thinness, ball bearings for the train wheels, rather than conventional bridges and pivots.

Both Vacheron and Piaget used the Jean Lasalle calibers, but the marriage didn't work out in either case. The reason is simple – the movements didn't work, either, at least not very well and not for very long. They had the same problem as the ultra-thin quartz movements in the Concord Delirium. They were so thin that not only could you bend them to the point of breakage just by tightening the watch strap a little too much, you also couldn't open up the watch cases to service the Jean Lassale calibers without destroying them – servicing a watch with the caliber 1200 in it, or the automatic caliber 2000, often meant throwing the whole movement away and replacing it.

It was a brave effort and the movements even won a few awards in their time, but watch case and movement engineering just wasn't ready to push things that far. Nowadays, the thinnest series produced mechanical watch is from Piaget: The Altiplano AUC, which is only 2mm thick, overall. However, the AUC manages it by using the case as the movement plate and also using manufacturing techniques, as well as special case alloys, that weren't around in the 1970s. The Lassale movements have always kind of reminded me of some of Nikola Tesla's inventions – wild, fascinating ideas, but destined to dwell ultimately not in history's record book of enduring triumphs, but rather, in the sad land of might-have-been.

Straight From A Bored Ten-Year-Old's Trapper Keeper, It's The Hublot LaFerrari

Unfortunately, in retrospect, some of the stuff that came out of the industry's apparent willingness to put a lot of money into throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck, were plenty of watches that seemed mind-blowing at first glance, but which have not aged well from a design standpoint (and which, on top of that, often worked poorly or not at all).

Now, while they're definitely in the minority, there are a very few brands which have managed to make being grossly outrageous on a regular basis into a very satisfying brand for their clients, and moreover into a winning formula for long-term success. This is actually very difficult to do – think of making a successful superhero movie franchise. It looks like all you need is a lot of noise, non-stop kinetic action, and show-stopping set-piece fight sequences, but making all that into compelling storytelling rather than sound and fury signifying nothing is harder than it looks. The failures definitely outnumber the successes.

One watch brand that's managed to become the horological equivalent of the Avengers franchise is Hublot. I can't think of a company that has made a higher percentage of watches that I wouldn't want to own under any circumstances, but that doesn't matter to Hublot, and I'm a hundred percent sure that neither Jean-Claude Biver or his successors have ever lost a moment of sleep over whether or not I, or any other fundamentally conservative enthusiast, would ever want one of their watches. They're having too much fun.

Which is why I feel no qualms at all about saying that the Hublot LaFerrari, with 50-day power reserve, is (for me) quite possibly the worst thing they've ever done, and one of the worst watches, ever. The problem isn't that it's a big, loud design with all the subtlety of a double shot of Everclear. The problem is that the design's an aggregate of every hypermacho watch design cliché imaginable. The oblong angular case, with its Darth Vader-esque geometry looks like the sort of thing you'd get if you asked for a cool watch design from a ten-year-old whose idea of "cool" comes from staring at a 1970s Lamborghini Countach poster for too long. You look at it and feel like you should feel something but the whole package is so thorough a retread of ideas which, by the time the LaFerrari came out in 2014, we'd seen a million times before, that you hardly see the watch at all, much less feel anything about it. It is, however, resoundingly successful at one thing – it might just be the most derivative design in the history of watchmaking.

The Sad Tale Of The Unspeakably Incoherent Concord C1 Gravity Tourbillon /Time Suspended

The company, however, gradually began to fade in prominence as mechanical watches increasingly started to become synonymous with luxury, and the idea of paying luxury prices for a quartz watch (other than something gem-set) became more and more passé. The company then decided, very late in the game, to stage a comeback as a mechanical watchmaker, and to make its intention to be taken very seriously as a high-end luxury mechanical brand unambiguously clear, so in 2009 it created the Concord Quantum Gravity C1 Tourbillon. This is a creation that has always reminded me of something a watchmaker friend wrote in another context, many years ago, which is, "There's no reasoning with this watch." 

Alas, there were two problems. The first was that by 2009, tourbillon fatigue had started to set in. Everybody and his brother and sister and the cat and the dog were making tourbillons at that point. This meant that you couldn't just push out a tourbillon – you had to push out an extreme tourbillon (if I had a nickel for every time I saw the word "extreme" in a press release from the mid-2000s, I could take a bath in nickels). The other problem was that 2009 was, for reasons I'm sure no one needs to be reminded of, not the best time ever to launch a hyperbolically brash ultra-luxury anything.

That said, I'm pretty sure that the Quantum Gravity Tourbillon, and its even more insane successor, the C1 Quantum Gravity Tourbillon Time Suspended, would have sunk like a lead Zeppelin under any circumstances. Not only were they just in time to be part of the last gasp of the hyperwatch fad of the mid-2000s, they were also pretty much the absolute antithesis of anything anyone who remembered what the name Concord used to mean, would want from Concord. Rebranding is hard to do under any circumstances; rebranding this extreme, in which you make something that screams contempt for the very identity of the brand itself, and its history, has never been the way to bet. And the designs were not so much a fever dream of extreme watchmaking, as they were a nightmare – aesthetically, they make about as much sense as the last fifteen minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

All this is to say that with the benefit of hindsight, it wasn't such a hot idea. Concord never really recovered. I would like to be able to say, by the way, that I saw it coming, but in 2008-2009 I was probably just as drunk on the heady wine of the hyperwatch boom as any other watch journalist. I don't regret the era – we were all having a blast, and to some extent just about every watch brand was pushing things too far at the time. But I can think of few watches that might better epitomize the dangers of not knowing when you've got too much of what might not be a good thing, after all.

To all of our readers celebrating Thanksgiving, may you have a safe and joyful holiday. And a very big HODINKEE thank you to all our readers, community members, and supporters! And thanks also to the watch industry, watchmakers and designers – we kid a little in this story but without you, and your willingness to sometimes try out-there stuff, we wouldn't be in business at all.  –Jack