Louis Moinet celebrates 250th anniversary with horological aplomb
Louis Moinet, the inventor of the chronograph, was born in 1768. To celebrate this 250th anniversary, and to coincide with the summer solstice and its connotations of rebirth, Ateliers Louis Moinet has made four major announcements: about timepieces made by the firm, its heritage, and future developments
Ultravox – Louis Moinet’s first ever Hour-Strike
The hour-strike complication is an extremely rare member of the strike mechanism family, and the layout used by Louis Moinet is quite possibly unique. The mechanism has been revealed, enabling its complexity to be admired. The magic of watchmaking mechanics is embodied by the moving yokes and the engraved hammer that marks out the hours. Two hundred years ago, Louis Moinet’s clocks and pocket watches chimed the hours for leading figures of his day. Now, his name has been joined with that of Eric Coudray, a great present-day watchmaker, to create a new masterpiece in the same spirit.
The hour-strike is a rare Fine Watchmaking complication, and rarer still when it is the product of a fully independent firm, based on an exclusive movement. Ultravox lays bare all of the mechanics of this grande complication. A natural extension of the watchmaking style implemented for Memoris, which revealed all the workings of the chronograph on the dial side, Ultravox goes much further, unveiling its entire mechanism.
The Ultravox bears the name of Watchmaker Eric Coudray, winner of the Gaïa Prize and one of the greatest watch designers alive, who with his outstanding team, contributed greatly to the watch. The strike mechanism denotes each passing hour on the hour, marking out the appropriate number of chimes. A silencer mechanism also allows the wearer to disengage the chime, if needed.
For Louis Moinet to unveil its entire mechanism on the wrist, a special plate had to be designed, including over 50 jewels, to engage the chime mechanism’s various components, whose arrangement is extremely complex. The central flirt triggers a system arming the hammer at twelve o’clock, and strikes out the hours on a gong arrayed around the movement. The function of the fly, meanwhile, is to channel power from the barrel, regulating the rhythm of the chime.
The Ultravox plate finish in “Moinet blue” is designed to reflect the light and offset the block-polished and chamfered screws above it, showcasing the acoustic mechanism. The rear reveals a system with darkened, parallel double rotors. The first of these serves to generate force for the hours and minutes mechanism, while the second is wholly given over to the chime. With a diameter of 46.5 mm, the Ultravox will be available this autumn, in a first limited edition of just 28 rose gold timepieces.
Louis Moinet back in Bourges
On June 21, 2018, the City of Bourges, where Moinet was born, had its very own street named after the famous watchmaker. Two things made this a particularly remarkable event: the inauguration took place precisely on the 250th anniversary of Louis Moinet’s birth. Secondly, the street in question is not merely in the town of his birth, but directly adjacent to where he lived in the 1820s, running alongside his own home. 250 years on, the house is still there, and has been formally identified by a college of historians. “Impasse Louis Moinet”, unveiled in the presence of Bourges City councillors, is right where the inventor of the chronograph was born.
The Louis Moinet digital museum
From the outset, Ateliers Louis Moinet has constantly undertaken to restore the renown of the stupendous inventor Louis Moinet, who was a painter, sculptor, watchmaker, scientist, and author of the famed “Traité d’Horlogerie”, a work of reference that remained an authority for close to a century. The authenticity of this undertaking is underpinned by the reconstitution of Moinet’s heritage, of which his clocks and original copies of his Traité are prime examples. At their headquarters in Saint-Blaise, Neuchâtel, Ateliers Louis Moinet has gathered together a sizeable collection, including a large number of restored, functional timepieces. Now, for the first time, this completely unique heritage – the only one of its kind in the world – is being made available online, free of charge and painstakingly documented. Future acquisitions will gradually be added to this “Digital museum”. Although it is not exhaustive, it is already the largest collection of authenticated Louis Moinet objects in the world.
Partnership with HEAD
To ensure that Louis Moinet’s heritage lives on, the atelier has entered into a partnership with HEAD, the Geneva University of Art and Design. The partnership involves a contest – with prize money of CHF 5,000 – to get students thinking about what the watch of the future might look like. The exact rubric for the competition is as follows: “The traditional Swiss watch is under threat from the digital watch. Devise a watch embodying Swiss watchmaking values and offering a relevant answer to this challenge for today’s market.” The results will be determined by a panel made up of representatives from HEAD and Ateliers Louis Moinet, and will be announced in autumn 2018.
