The Retrograde: One of My Favorite Complications

Credits:  Article and images by Ian Skellern @ Quill & Pad.  See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/09/28/the-retrograde-one-of-my-favorite-complications/

What do you get when you meet a pair of cousins that seem like they could be siblings? Besides confused, you get curious.

Why are these two people, who have different parents, so strikingly similar? It all comes down to lineage, the DNA coursing through their veins.

First cousins only share approximately 12.5 percent of their DNA, the rest are wild cards. That divergence usually makes all the difference, but sometimes it fades into the background and similarities take over.

This natural occurrence somehow strangely describes the way objects and products develop, too, as some things clearly had a common ancestor.

Automobiles and farm tractors really aren’t that different from each other with shared origins in the horse-drawn wagons that became steam-powered vehicles.

A variety of steam-powered vehicles and locomotives drove further invention into the traction engine for agriculture and steam cars for personal transportation. From there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to what we have today.

Fonderie 47 Inversion Principle in white gold

Speaking of a jump, one of the best examples of shared ancestry in the watchmaking world are the jump hour mechanism and retrograde indication. While there are multiple ways to construct both, many share a common mechanism origin.

This is why the retrograde indication is one of my favorite “Because We Can” (BWC) complications: because I already love the engineering behind the jump hour too (see The Jump Hour: A Love Story).

Gears are also an amazing invention and have allowed watchmakers to make incredible creations.

Simple gear systems leave a multitude of openings for creativity. Depending on the application, offshoot mechanisms can create linear motion, segmented arcs, back-and-forth movements, and of course instantaneous jumps among other things.

The Urwerk UR-CC1 contains an interesting retrograde mechanism

The retrograde indication takes advantage of many different motion strategies, but many begin with the simple snail cam.

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Credits:  Article and images by Ian Skellern @ Quill & Pad.  See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/09/28/the-retrograde-one-of-my-favorite-complications/