Wafer-thin and mint
Piaget earns its place in the record books with the ultra-thin 900P
Piaget’s Altiplano 900P slipped into the record books at SIHH this year, becoming the world’s thinnest mechanical watch. At just 3.65mm deep, it’s a whole 0.4mm thinner than the previous record-holder, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Master Ultra-Thin Jubilée. In the business of skin-tight watches, that’s miles.
Watch houses that specialise in ultra-thinness (Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Patek Philippe are the other leaders) talk of the thousands of hours development time involved in slimming down a mechanical watch. Piaget took three years to work out how to cram a movement, a case and a scratch-resistant sapphire crystal into a watch that’s only 0.5mm thicker than a pound coin.
The breakthrough came when the brand’s in-house experts realised they could do away with the movement’s baseplate, the largest part of a watch movement, which holds other parts in place like a car chassis. In its place, they used the watch’s case back, integrating two of the thickest parts of a watch into one self-contained unit. Clever.
But they didn’t stop there. The Altiplano 900P’s dial is pushed into an off-centre position and set into the bridges – normally, a watch dial, no matter how small, sits on top of the bridges. Again, fractions saved. They also shaved crucial thickness off as many of the watch’s 145 components as they could – some of the wheels are just 0.12mm thick.
Piaget has form in the field of ultra-thinness. It created its first ultra-thin movement, the 2mm thick 9P, in 1957. That was followed in 1960 by the 12P, which became the world’s thinnest automatic calibre at 2.3mm. Today, the brand holds 12 records for thinness in movement making, including the thinnest minute repeater calibre, which sits inside the Emperador Coussin Ultra-Thin Minute Repeater, launched last year.
The Piaget Altiplano 900P has a 48-hour power reserve and is available in either a white or gold case, with prices starting from £19,400.
A mechanical watch without the price-tag
Mechanical watches, by dint of their complex mechanisms and oh-so-special craftsmanship, cost at least four figures, right? Wrong. Not anymore. They may not even cost three. Swatch’s new game-changer – and that’s really what it is – is called Sistem51, and is a fully mechanical, battery-free, plastic watch that’s assembled entirely by robots in 20 minutes flat. The winding rotor and all moving parts are attached around a single central screw, and the name attests to the fact that there are indeed only 51 parts inside. Announced last year with a projected price of £70-£140, it’s coming to the UK later this year – but you can pick one up in Switzerland now for 150 Swiss francs. In 1983 Swatch revolutionized the market with its original cheap plastic watches – now it’s doing it again. www.swatch.com