BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
When I visited Breguet’s boutique on Bond Street, London, I was chatting with their PR and Marketing Manager for the UK about where I think the brand should be headed, as it has done some lovely watches in the past few years, but has become a little repetitive. That’s hard for me to admit, as I really love the brand and its story. I suggested that they should go back to their roots with the inventiveness of Abraham-Louis Breguet himself. It’d be impossible to recreate his level of thinking, but Switzerland has plenty of talent to go around these days. Lo and behold, we have the brand’s new watch, the Expérimentale 1 ref E001BH/S9/5ZV.
The Expérimentale 1 is part of a brand-new collection in the Breguet lineup designed to showcase the brand at its most unrestrained. We could think of it like the Skunk Works of Lockheed Martin or, for a concept closer to home, we should probably liken the Expérimentale collection to Patek Philippe’s “Advanced Research” watches, although they aren’t organised as a formal collection. This is the first time we’re seeing Breguet give their experimentation a collection of its own.
The Expérimentale 1’s main focus is the new escapement setup, which reflects Abraham-Louis Breguet’s own research. The movement features a tourbillon with its escapement beating at 10Hz, which I believe is a first for any tourbillon escapement. It is also a constant force escapement, which means it delivers accuracy consistently across the watch’s power reserve without resorting to another device such as a remontoir d’egalité, a rare thing indeed in watchmaking.
Further, Breguet utilises magnetism to make the components of the escapement interact. The escape wheel and the lever use permanent magnets to move; in every conventional watch, these components physically touch, which is normal but comes with certain drawbacks. The main drawback is that friction can significantly affect the tiny components in wristwatches. By using permanent magnets to move the escape wheel rather than a pallet fork tipped with jewels, Breguet increases efficiency and accuracy.
The impulse pin, which is underneath the balance wheel and interacts with the pallet fork, does make contact with said pallet fork, but it only works to stop the pallet from moving. When power is being delivered, there is no physical contact between components. The result is a system unlike anything else in mainstream watchmaking production. There is a lot more to it than that, but I cannot find a good way to word Breguet’s innovations without this article turning into a word salad. What you need to know is that Breguet claims this movement is accurate to within +/- 1 second per day.
Despite having worked on the tourbillon assembly, Breguet also had time to come up with a pair of patented mainspring barrels which feature two blued springs separated by a sapphire spacer, allowing this movement a 72-hour power reserve. It also features plenty of high-end finishing, including Breguet’s Quai de l’Horloge guilloché applied to the Breguet Gold plates.
The dial side offers the most impressive view, of course, with the calibre 7250 visible through the openworked dial. The Expérimentale 1’s regulator dial layout should provide easy reading, which is good because Breguet’s lovely but thin blued hands sometimes get a bit lost in the view. The movement is set under a box-type sapphire crystal and within a Marine-style case measuring 43.5mm x 13.3mm with 100m of water resistance. The coin-edging (or fluting, as they would call it) is back and looking thoroughly modern. We had quite a few comments on Breguet’s fluted cases in our last publication, see here. The watch is presented on a blue rubber strap with a pin buckle made from Breguet Gold.
All of this marvellous engineering can be yours for the princely sum of CHF320,000. Production is limited to 75 examples set to be made over a roughly two-year period. I was surprised when they announced this, but pleased that they did, as it seems there will be more Expérimentale watches to come. We might even get to see them revisiting the 10Hz chronograph concept from their long-gone Type XXII. We’ll see.
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