The ten Patek Philippes that changed watchmaking

There’s plenty of debate about who made the first wristwatch and for whom. Some say Breguet for the Queen of Naples; some say Cartier for Alberto Santos-Dumont. Others (including Guinness in its book of records) insist it was Patek Philippe. In 1868 it created a wristwatch for a Hungarian countess: an ornate, rectangular, yellow-gold piece set with diamonds, which was more costume jewellery than timepiece. However, the countess’s watch did nothing to persuade gentlemen to empty their pockets of the time – men’s wristwatches didn’t begin to catch on until the Great War.

In the early part of the 20th century, the world’s wealthiest men played a game of horological one-upmanship that spawned some of history’s most complicated and historically important watches. Ultimately, victory went to the American financier Henry Graves Jr, whose 1933 Patek Philippe ‘Supercomplication’ had 24 complications, including a minute repeater with Westminster Chimes, grande and petite sonneries, a perpetual calendar accurate to the year 2100, an alarm, and a celestial chart for the New York night-time sky. Produced long before the advent of CAD technology, it held the title of the world’s most complicated watch until 1989, when it was beaten by another Patek – the Calibre 89. One record it maintains is that of the world’s most expensive watch, confirmed last year when it sold at auction for $24m, smashing its own record of $11m set in 1999.

It’s a curiosity that the decade that almost killed the Swiss watch industry is also the decade that gave us some of watchmaking’s most enduring designs. In the 1970s, while the quartz crisis was pillaging traditional Swiss watch factories, a freelancer by the name of Gérald Genta emerged as the watch designer nonpareil. He worked for Audemars Piguet, creating the Royal Oak in 1972; for IWC, where he updated the Ingénieur in 1976; and for Patek in the same year in a marriage of minds that produced the porthole-shaped Nautilus, a steel sports watch that shared a name with the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Few watches boast so perfect a blend of horology and masculinity.

It’s often said (at least, in my circles it is) that if you close your eyes and think of a wristwatch, the first thing that will come into your head will look uncannily like a Patek Philippe Calatrava. In 1932, its round case and simple white Roman numeral dial became watchmaking’s defining trope – an aesthetic that has since been widely imitated. Its design was inspired by the Bauhaus principle of form following function, which goes some way to explaining its longevity – today, it is Patek’s flagship line. 1932 proved to be a significant year for the company, too. As well as launching the Calatrava, Patek Philippe was bought by Jean and Charles Henri Stern – whose great-grandson Thierry became president of the firm in 2009.

Patek pulled out all the stops for its 150th anniversary and created Calibre 89, still judged by most experts to be the most complicated timepiece ever made. It had an astonishing 33 complications, took nine years to build, and was made up of 1,728 parts. Among those complications were an Easter date indication and a secular perpetual calendar with a retrograde date indication that won’t need adjusting until the 28th century. Both functions were awarded Swiss patents. Only four Calibre 89s have been made to date, which explains the price tag – in 2009, the last example to appear at auction went under the hammer at 5.1m Swiss francs.

The oval-shaped Ellipse had been on the scene since 1968, so there was nothing new about its looks by the late 1970s. What made the 1977 model gleam like a mirror in the sun was its movement, Calibre 240. It had a 22-carat gold micro-rotor set flush to the bridges, so that the whole calibre measured just 2.53mm thick. That made it the perfect base on which to add further modules so that Patek could create ultra-thin complicated watches, many of which would become icons in their own right. Calibre 240 is still in Patek’s collection, and still the brand’s thinnest self-winding movement.

Annual calendars aren’t exactly two-a-penny these days, but 20 years ago, they didn’t exist at all. Patek broke new ground in 1996 with its Ref 5035, which became the world’s first watch with a calendar display that only needed adjusting once a year at the end of February. Seen as a more affordable alternative to the perpetual calendar, which caters for February’s odd length even in leap years, it actually had more parts than its supposed superior and was thought to be no less expensive to make. The annual calendar was awarded a Swiss patent and has since become a Patek signature.

It seems odd, but it wasn’t until 2005 that Patek created its first in-house chronograph calibre – ie, one that it developed and produced under its own roof. It wasn’t just any chronograph, mind. Not only did it have a vaunted split-seconds function (one that can time two events that start at the same time but finish independently) operated by a single pushpiece, but it was also the thinnest column-wheel chronograph ever made, coming in at 5.25mm thick. It was said at the time that it took a watchmaker two months to assemble and adjust the 5959’s movement, and its run was therefore very limited, making it highly collectable. Sotheby’s sold one in 2013 for more than £227k, almost £35k more than estimated.

The first of Patek Philippe’s groundbreaking Advanced Research pieces had a lubrication-free escape wheel made of a silicon-based material called Silinvar. Many experts agree that the introduction of silicon into watchmaking – spearheaded by Patek, Rolex and Swatch Group’s ETA, which collaborated on Silinvar – is the most important horological innovation of the past decade. Silicon is non-magnetic, frictionless, lightweight and can be manufactured to very fine tolerances in high volumes. Applied in the moving parts of a watch, it makes for a more accurate, efficient and reliable product that needs far less maintenance than standard brass.