History of the Tourbillon

Perhaps the most talked about feature, the tourbillon has its place in history as one of the most admired pieces of engineering in watchmaking.

Who created the tourbillon?
The God, a.k.a Anton Louis Breguet. Aside from creating and innovating a lot of things, the tourbillon was his crowning achievement in 1795.

So what exactly is a tourbillon?
It is quite simple to explain really. If you guys look at traditional automatic watches and observe the oscillator, it just moves back and forth to provide energy for the watch to tell time. I am sure you guys have seen this many times before. A tourbillon on the other hand has the entire assembly that holds it together moving freely.

So what exactly is the point of this?
The point of this is to improve accuracy and to counter the effects of gravity. Lets say you have the watch face up if you have your wrist flat on a table. By the force of gravity that oscillator and housing are biased downward, thus causing torsion and reducing the frequency at which the oscillator moves back and forth. This is the same thing as if you had your wrist on the side. So by moving the entire cage, you can counteract this because the cage is never in the same position for more than a fraction of a second at a time.

Sounds expensive......
You got it. Tourbillons are extremely hard to assemble. There are a bunch of chinese manufacturers who sell knock off tourbillons but the watches would be lucky to last more than a month. A quality tourbillon in the watch would starts at around $100,000. Nowadays, the feature is really for watch manufacturers to show off who has the bigger dick.

What does a tourbillon look like?