00:09Dear IWC aficionados, it's a real pleasure to welcome you to a second series of short movies.
00:17We are going to dedicate to the high watchmaking at IWC. So in the next couple of movies you're
00:25going to see, we will talk about our tourbillon retroguard, our tourbillon constant force,
00:30about other specialities like the perpetual calendar, chronographs, etc. I'm really looking
00:38forward to that and I hope you will enjoy these short presentations.
00:49The tourbillon, it is probably one of the most sophisticated constructions in watchmaking.
00:55The first tourbillon was constructed in the early 19th century by Abraham Louis Breguet and the goal
01:02of these watchmakers in those days was to reduce the influence of the g-forces of the earth to have
01:08a more precise march of the watch. Therefore the escaped men were encaged in a small cage and this
01:16cage rotates one time in one minute. So we are talking about a minute tourbillon. IWC introduced
01:22his first tourbillon in the year 1993 and it was the famous Ile des Triéros watch in those times,
01:29the most complicated wristwatch in the world that had a tourbillon in it. And we are very,
01:35very proud that the construction of the tourbillon was made here in-house in the watchmaking school.
01:41So you can say the tourbillon of the Ile des Triéros Carphousia, it's really an IWC tourbillon.
01:46Like in those days, also today, the tourbillon construction is very, very, very hard to manufacture.
01:53So only the most skilled watchmakers are able to manufacture a tourbillon. So we are very,
01:58very proud that our watchmakers still have those skills to keep this tradition of the tourbillon
02:04alive at IWC. For our tourbillons at IWC, we use two base calibers. The one is the hand-wound
02:12caliber, the Jones, and the other one is our famous caliber 5000, the huge automatic movement.
02:20We at IWC, we use only flying tourbillons. Flying tourbillon means it's only beard on one side,
02:27and you have the imagination when you look at the dial that there is no connection to the movement
02:33when you see a tourbillon. For our Portuguese tourbillon hand-wound, we used the classic
02:39construction-based movement from 1930. With this classical construction, we had a lot of energy
02:46and space. So we were able to develop a very huge tourbillon at 9 o'clock dial side, and we
02:54had also
02:54a lot of energy, which enabled us to enhance the original 2.5 Hz of the movement to an exceptional
03:034 Hz, which brings also a lot of additional precision into this movement. The tourbillon,
03:09which we use on the automatic movement, is the one for the Portuguese tourbillon
03:14mystère retrograde. The reason why it's called mystère is because it's also a flying tourbillon,
03:21but here, very special, the so-called fixed second wheel is black-coated, and with this we have the imagination
03:29that there is no connection to the base movement. The connection seems to be invisible.
03:34These features make this watch a very special masterpiece of our collection.
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