00:14We often talk about perpetual calendars, but what is this? Our calendar system, the Gregorian
00:23calendar is very complicated. With a month with 31 days, with 30 days 28, and when we are
00:33wearing a wristwatch with a date indicator, we have to adjust it every end of the month.
00:40A watch with a perpetual calendar should do this automatically. My task was to develop a new
00:50perpetual calendar. A wristwatch with a perpetual calendar. It was not easy in this time, beginning
01:00the 1980s. Not easy, that means it was a real adventure to do it. With all tools I had or
01:12I had
01:12not, I had to try it. How could I do this in a wristwatch? I wanted to do something extraordinary.
01:24I say it should be a new generation of perpetual calendar. Easy for the user, easy to adjust only
01:35by turning the crown. It should be easy to produce. And my way, all these years, I always tried to
01:49make
01:49it possible to make an industrial serial production of this perpetual calendar that was never before.
02:00So I got my first ideas how to change the date end of February, for instance, and to change the
02:15date
02:16hand for the last three days. And so I had my ideas, a date wheel with 31 T's, then a
02:29small lever,
02:30to change the date wheel for one step every night. And then I needed another small lever
02:41to change the date hand from February 28th of 31st. One day in 1984, I finished the first prototype.
02:55And this was a very important day for me. I got a microscope. I got a camera
03:07on top of the microscope on top of the microscope. And so I started the calendar one evening of the
03:1727th of
03:19February, and I was observing how it was working. And it changed it to the 28th of February. So I
03:30continued to observe
03:32the changement from the 28th of February to 1st of March. And I made photos and photos. I never was
03:43working the whole day
03:45on top of the day, only looking in the whole day, only looking in the microscope, how it works, and
03:50it works. And it really changed to 1st of March.
03:56And for me, it was one of my happiest days of my life.
04:07And with this combination, this mechanical movement, with a perpetual calendar,
04:16IWC was able to give to a wristwatch much more than any quartz watch can give. And so
04:28the mechanical watch was really the winner in this time.
04:36Until today, IWC is still building the perpetual calendar, which was invented in 1983 by Kurt Klaus.
04:44The speciality of our perpetual calendar is that it shows a full calendar, which means it shows you the day,
04:51the date, the month, the year, the decade, the century, and also the millennia, which changes,
04:58for example, from 1999 to the year 2000. Another speciality of the IWC perpetual calendar is the
05:05double moon phase, which is placed at 12 o'clock, that will show you the northern and the southern
05:10hemisphere. Probably the most important feature of the perpetual calendar is setting the whole system
05:16once it has to start running again. Kurt Klaus wanted to make it as simple as possible,
05:22not to be pushing a lot of buttons, so he just set everything over the crown,
05:26which means pulling the stem, and you can switch the whole calendar and set it over the crown.
05:31With the perpetual calendar, IWC created a milestone in watchmaking,
05:36and therefore it has been and will remain one of our most important complications.
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