SJX Watches
In Depth: Patek Philippe Star Caliber 2000
The Star Caliber 2000 occupies a peculiar position in the history of grand complications. It was never the most complicated watch in the world. At its debut it ranked fourth — behind Patek Philippe’s own Calibre 89 and Graves Supercomplication, and the Leroy 01 — and in the quarter-century since, the complexity record has moved further still, most notably to Vacheron Constantin. The complication arms race the Calibre 89 inadvertently triggered ran its full course, and the Star Caliber 2000 was never part of it. What it did instead was something harder to measure and, as it turns out, more durable. It demonstrated that the tradition’s inheritance of unsolved problems — the desynchronised equation, the imperfect melody, and the moon exiled from the sky — was not inevitable. That each problem had a solution. And that the solutions, taken together, produced a different kind of watch: not necessarily more complicated but more coherent; not a larger accumulation of independent mechanisms but an integrated instrument in which every display refers to a single source of truth. The arms race In early 1989, as Switzerland prepared to celebrate the most complicated portable timepiece ever made, the man who had just assembled it returned to his bench. Paul Buclin had spent years assembling and setting up the Calibre 89 by hand — 1,728 components driving 33 complications. Weighing most of a kilogram, the watch itself required its own carrying case. The watch was a monument...
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