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Results for Vallée de Joux

22,960 articles · 2,532 videos found · page 96 of 850

Prix Gaïa 2025 Awarded to Dr Helmut Crott for Scholarship SJX Watches
Aug 25, 2025

Prix Gaïa 2025 Awarded to Dr Helmut Crott for Scholarship

Awarded annually by the Musée International d’Horlogerie (MIH), one of Switzerland’s leading timekeeping museums, the Prix Gaïa recognises individuals who have contributed to watchmaking in three categories. This year’s winner in the “History [and] Research” category is Dr Helmut Crott. Best known for having founded the eponymous auction house, Dr Crott is also an author, scholar, and former owner of Urban Jürgensen, amongst other roles. In 2021 he authored Le Cadran, an in-depth study of dials and dial making techniques of 20th century wristwatches. Le Cadran by Dr Helmut Crott Past winners of the Prix Gaïa include Reinhard Meis, Jonathan Betts, Pierre-Yves Donzé, Kathleen Pritschard, and Ludwig Oechslin, all scholars and authors who have contributed substantively to the body of knowledge in the field. Alongside Dr Crott, this year’s winners are Jean-Jacques Paolini for “Entrepreneurship”, and Roger W. Smith for “Craftsmanship [and] Creation”. As the successor to Georges Daniels’ brand of English watchmaking, Mr Smith now produces watches under his own name, with his achievements and timepieces well known. Jean-Jacques Paolini Mr Paolini, on the other hand, is less known outside the industry, but he is arguably most responsible for building the enterprise that’s the largest employer in La Chaux-de-Fonds. In 1980, Mr Paolini took over his family’s case and bracelet manufacturing business, developing its operations sufficiently that it was acq...

Louis Erard Introduces the Gravée Main, with a Fully Engraved Case Worn & Wound
Louis Erard Introduces Aug 22, 2025

Louis Erard Introduces the Gravée Main, with a Fully Engraved Case

Of all the artisanal specialities in watchmaking, case engraving has to be among the most obscure and unheralded. I think there are a few reasons for this. One, the dial is where the action is on most watches, and applying a time consuming artistic craft on the case might be seen by some watchmakers as a waste of valuable time. Another factor is that to a large extent, we’ve all been trained to appreciate a particular type of case finishing. We see crisp transitions between brushed and polished surfaces, and that registers as being of a certain level of quality that we expect in a luxury watch. If those elements aren’t there, even if they’re substituted by something that might be visually striking, our reptile brains feel like there’s something missing. The latest in Louis Erard’s ongoing Métiers d’Art series, however, is a good opportunity to appreciate complex case engraving in a new way.  The whole idea behind how Louis Erard approaches Métiers d’Art, and to a certain extent the brand’s focus more generally, is to make craft accessible. The new Gravée Main is perhaps their most ambitious attempt in this area to date. Virtually every steel surface (the case, bezel, lugs, crown, and buckle) is hand engraved. According to the brand, each watch takes upwards of 50 hours to engrave by hand, and only 99 will be made.  Engraving is one of those things that really comes alive when you look at it closely and imagine that painstaking work that went into creat...

Opinion: A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing (Or, Please Don’t Call Me a Watch Expert) Worn & Wound
Rolex from 40 or 50 Aug 20, 2025

Opinion: A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing (Or, Please Don’t Call Me a Watch Expert)

We live in a golden age of watch knowledge. Never before have so many people known so much about watches, or cared about them so deeply, and it’s genuinely remarkable. Have a specific question about a rare Rolex from 40 or 50 years ago? The answer is probably just a Google search away. Need to check that the watch you’re looking to buy was made in exactly the spec you’re seeing on eBay? There’s almost certainly a forum post somewhere breaking it down for you - no subject is too esoteric, no prompt too singular. There’s enough watch knowledge out there to fill a lifetime, and probably more, if you go looking for it. Then there’s the other… stuff. Open up Instagram and you’ll immediately be inundated by accounts professing to represent ‘watch experts’ peddling surface-level observations as hard-earned insights. Start to absorb enough of this, and it’s easy to convince yourself you should count among them, that you’ve done the real work required to achieve expertise. It’s a trap, and an easy one to fall into at that. Because unless someone in your life brought you into this world, you’re probably the foremost watch expert in your life. You’re almost certainly the one your friends and family come to when (cough, cough… if) they have questions about watches. Just being able to tell the difference between a quartz and a mechanical watch probably puts you in the top quartile of watch knowledge. And if you’re reading articles like this on sites ...

A History and Guide – How to Use a Dive Bezel Worn & Wound
Aug 18, 2025

A History and Guide – How to Use a Dive Bezel

John Scott Haldane had a problem. Britain’s Royal Navy had commissioned the Scottish physiologist to find a solution for a unique problem facing their divers: decompression. Known since the mid-19th century, decompression sickness (DCS) posed a serious risk for divers and laborers working in pressurized environments, such as caissons. It was his job to develop a set of decompression tables for safe diving operations. It boils down to how gases act under pressure. When breathing a gas mixture at depth - for the sake of simplicity, we will say compressed air, or approximately 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with the rest being inert gases - the oxygen is used up by the body, and the nitrogen is absorbed into the bloodstream. This build-up will dissolve as it is effectively off-gassed, as it does when each of us breathes here on the surface. Enter pressure. Should a diver undergo a rapid change in pressure, such as by ascending too quickly, the nitrogen will separate from the blood and form bubbles in the tissues and joints. The resulting pain has a habit of contorting its victims, giving DCS its more readily-known nickname of “the bends.” John Scott Haldane had a problem. Britain’s Royal Navy had commissioned the Scottish physiologist to find a solution for a unique problem facing their divers: decompression. Known since the mid-19th century, decompression sickness (DCS) posed a serious risk for divers and laborers working in pressurized environments, such as caisso...

First Look – The Orient Bambino 75th Anniversary Classic and Day-Night Come with Plenty of Vintage Soul and Modern Charm Monochrome
Orient Aug 4, 2025

First Look – The Orient Bambino 75th Anniversary Classic and Day-Night Come with Plenty of Vintage Soul and Modern Charm

For many watch enthusiasts, the Orient Bambino is a rite of passage, often a first mechanical watch that proves you don’t have to break the bank to enjoy heritage design and honest, in-house watchmaking. To mark its 75th anniversary, Orient has refreshed its popular Bambino lineup with new dial colours and two limited editions that […]

We’re Still Doing This, Apparently: the Mission to Earthphase Moonshine Gold is Revealed Worn & Wound
Aug 4, 2025

We’re Still Doing This, Apparently: the Mission to Earthphase Moonshine Gold is Revealed

There’s almost nothing you can say to convince me the latest MoonSwatch, the not so elegantly named Mission to Earthphase Moonshine Gold, is not the product of a ChatGPT prompt entered by a Swatch exec. Maybe it said “What should the next entry in our never ending profit squeezing machine that is the MoonSwatch collection be called?” I can imagine an artificial intelligence suggesting something as silly, and also reminding the good people at Swatch that blue, and gold, and Snoopy are all very critical design characteristics that should be included.  Honestly, I hope AI is the culprit. I’d hate to think that human beings at a brand that I hold in such high regard are responsible for such a shallow mismatch of buzzwords and incoherent thematic elements. Let’s take stock of what we’re looking at here. This is a Bioceramic, quartz MoonSwatch much like all the others. It follows the original Earthphase model from last year and includes not just a moonphase complication, but an “Earthphase” that depicts the “phase” of the earth as seen from the moon. Useful? No. Whimsical? Perhaps.  There are a lot of little details though that are a bit of a grab bag of prior elements of MoonSwatches and Speedmasters of the past. Most notably, Snoopy and Woodstock are depicted right on the dial, watching the cosmic dance play out in front of them. The moons on the moonphase indicator are MoonShine gold plated. The graphical inspiration for the moonphase complication is the...