Credits: Article and images by Wei Koh @ Revolution Watch Magazine. See the original article here - https://revolutionwatch.com/grail-watch-1-ressence-x-alain-silberstein-carpe-diem/
I had long admired Ressence from afar. I vividly recall at the 2010 Basel fair, returning time and again to the “Palace” — the fancy name for the independent watchmakers’ tent — to look at one of the three functional prototypes that Mintiens was demonstrating. The buzz around him was incredible. I mean, everywhere I went, people would ask, “Have you seen Ressence? Who is this guy Benoît?” The baffling thing was that Mintiens was not from the Swiss watch industry; instead, he was an industrial designer from Antwerp, Belgium. But the thing about what he had created was that it went so far beyond a superficial reimagination of time telling that you would expect from an outsider. His watch was devastatingly original, utterly captivating and yet, at the same time, deeply horological. Why? OK, let me explain Ressence to you.
A traditional watch features a fixed dial with pinions where you place the hour, minute and seconds hand. Each of these revolves on its own axis at a different pace and is read off a fixed track. Now, in the period between 2000 and 2008, we saw the rise of a multitude of innovative and different ways to read the time, from Ulysse Nardin’s Freak which used the barrel cover to indicate the hours and a bridge bearing the balance wheel to read the minutes, to the three-dimensional spinning hour satellites in Urwerk’s Opus V. These are great watches, but by 2008, we were beginning to suffer fatigue from an opportunistic overabundance of whirling, spinning, alternative methods of telling time. There were even watches with floating magnets instead of hands. It was all a bit too much. So much so that with the onset of the 2009 financial crisis, the world instantly retreated back to classical watchmaking, leaving these kinds of watches in the dust, at least for a while. So, in 2010, when Mintiens presented Ressence, it was a total anomaly to have someone trying to present a totally novel way of representing time.
The reason that Ressence was such a critical success was that it was elegant, meaningful, intelligent and joyful at the same time. Firstly, rather than the massive oversized behemoths, Mintiens’ prototype, which would become the Type 1, was wearable and relatively slim. Secondly, the way time was represented was just so damn clever! Mintiens used a planetary gearing system to create a display that worked like this: the hour, running seconds and days of the week all appeared in small subdials that sat inside the main dial, which bore the minute indicator and completed a revolution each hour. This assured that all subdials would revolve around the main dial once every hour. But then, indicators on each of the subdials revolved around their respective axes at different speeds. Imagine one of those amusement park fun rides where every car is not only fixed to a rotating platform, but also rotates on its own axis at a different speed. Meaning, the hour would advance serenely when the minute hand on the main dial completes a full revolution. In contrast, the seconds indicator would blaze away a full 3,600 times and complete 60 full revolutions with each full one-hour revolution of the main dial. And of course, the day of the week would change each time the minute hand completed 24 full revolutions.
Credits: Article and images by Wei Koh @ Revolution Watch Magazine. See the original article here - https://revolutionwatch.com/grail-watch-1-ressence-x-alain-silberstein-carpe-diem/