Most crafts with much of the existing variety coming from variation and permutation have a basic technical vocabulary. Like in classic French cooking you have the so-called “mother” sauces (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomate, and hollandaise) on which the formal vocabulary of haute cuisine is built. In watchmaking, you have the time-only watch, the chronograph, the calendar (normal, annual, perpetual), the repeater, and so on. There is a lot of real interest to be found in coming up with an infinite number of variations on a theme and you could eat just French cuisine for the rest of your life with no pain, but if that was all you ever had, and suddenly someone offered you a shot at, say, sushi at Jiro’s, you’d probably leap at the chance like you’d never leapt before. Likewise, in watchmaking there is a standard repertoire of variations on the basics, from which many lifetimes of satisfaction can be had – but there are also, occasionally, watches different enough to be a real breath of fresh air.
There have been periods of really wacky inventiveness in the history of watchmaking. One of the greatest took place right at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, when breakneck innovation in precision timekeeping was just starting to really pick up steam. The Ovale Pantographe (first shown as a prototype in 2011) is a watch inspired by a much older pocket watch from this era.
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The Pantographe is part of the Ovale Collection, and features unique telescoping “pantograph” hands.
The basic idea behind the Pantographe is a simple one. It is a non-round watch, the distance between the tips of the hands and the perimeter of the dial varies as the hands go round. This is, you might say, a non-problem, and of course, human ingenuity being what it is, it is a non-problem which has called forth a solution, and one which is laudably Rube-Goldberg-esque: mechanical telescoping hands.
The Ovale Collection Pantographe is actually based on a much older watch, which is from about 1800 when high-precision watches had not yet become common, but when mechanics – which had by then become advanced enough to allow the creation of some truly impressive, if not bizarre, automata, such as the internationally renowned Digesting Duck of Vaucanson – allowed a more free reign to the imaginations of watchmakers than ever before.
These were the halcyon days that gave us the tourbillon, the detent escapement, the first practical marine chronometers, and on and on; this is also the era in horological history that gave us exotica like the pocket watch with ruby-set balance beating once per second (which is either a philosophical statement, or a practical joke) in the Sandoz Collection – and an oval pocket watch, with telescoping hands, by the English watchmakers Vardon and Stedman. A more carping, critical, or more basically practical person might say something like “Why not just make a round watch?”, but to Vardon and Stedman (at least, for one bright, shining, devil-may-care moment in the otherwise staid annals of British horology) watchmaking wasn’t about why, it was about why not.
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The Pantographe is based on this English pocket watch from 1800.
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A closer look at the original pocket watch’s telescoping hands.
The Pantographe is the same basic idea, but in a modern wristwatch, with a movement that has an eight-day power reserve. The movement is an important one for Parmigiani Fleurier; it’s basically caliber PF110 (which was originally created for the Kalpa Hebdomadaire family of watches, launched in 1999). With the module for the pantograph hands though, it’s caliber PF111. The name is taken from that of a drafting tool consisting of cross-linked mechanical arms, which was used to scale up or scale down drawings; the arms of a pantograph look very similar to the telescoping hands of the Pantographe watch.
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The case of the Pantographe is available in rose gold (shown) or white gold.
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The case shape and lugs give the watch very graceful curved lines.
The hands themselves are made of blued aluminum; one of the challenges in designing them was making sure that the hour and minute hands would never be too close in length to each other (the better to ensure legibility of the watch irrespective of the time).
