SJX Watches
Insight: Perfecting the Perpetual from Quartz Crisis till Today
As we approach the leap day of February 29, the unofficial day of commemoration for perpetual calendar owners, it’s worth considering the technical advances in perpetual calendar movements of the past 20 years. The perpetual calendar is, and has always been, a staple of haute horlogerie. But for most of its history, the technology remained largely stagnant. It wasn’t until the beginning of the modern era, in the 1980s when Swiss watchmaking was regrouping after the Quartz Crisis, that a new generation of watchmakers revisited this complication in earnest. In particular, they sought to address fundamental weaknesses in the way traditional perpetual calendar designs switch from one date to the next. The quintessential perpetual calendar layout, here in the first serially-produced perpetual calendar wristwatch with a leap year indicator, the Audemars Piguet ref. 5516, which was produced in the late 1950s One of the more recent – and most notable – efforts at reimagining the complication came from Stephen McDonnell, who developed the MB&F; Legacy Machine Perpetual. According to Mr McDonnell, the traditional approach to the perpetual calendar was a flawed premise. “For decades in the Swiss watch industry, and even until the present day, it has been accepted and expected that [perpetual calendar] watches would often be damaged by owners while trying to correct them,” explains Mr McDonnell, “This was seen simply as an unavoidable factor of [perpetual calendar] owner...
