World First

By adding a date, Patek Philippe has engineered the next evolution in world timing

Taken at face value, the fact that Patek Philippe has added a date to its latest World Time doesn’t sound like the most exciting innovation in watches right now. When you have Chanel adding headphones to a watch that you can wear as a necklace and IWC making a perpetual calendar whose accuracy will outlast humanity, adding a date to a watch appears pedestrian. That is until you realise that Patek Philippe hasn’t just added a date, it has added a date that is coupled with local time and can, if the international date line is crossed, be adjusted backwards. All using a monopusher crown.

It’s fitting that Patek Philippe should engineer the latest development in world timing. The marque has been synonymous with this function since the 1930s when it asked watchmaker Louis Cottier to downsize his world-time movement, previously only used in pocket watches, for a wristwatch. Despite being this early to the game, it was another moment in time that made this function a must-have for the travelling elite.

Initially launched as a limited edition at the Patek Philippe Watch Art Grand Exhibition in Tokyo, World Time has now entered the brand’s regular collection with a patented differential mechanism that couples the date wheel with the one that controls local time. This allows it to be altered backwards as well as forwards should the international date line – a temporal line of demarcation located halfway around the world from the prime meridian, separating two consecutive calendar dates – be crossed. In a traditional world-time set-up, two contradicting pieces of information, in this case set date forward or set it backwards, would get sent to the same date star-wheel in the movement, and block it. Patek Philippe’s engineers found a way to process these two pieces of information in parallel. The date hand is kept static until the local city is changed, then the date can either remain the same or goes back a day if the wearer passes the international date line – all done using a second finger that is able to hook the date wheel backwards. And you can operate all this technical wizardry with the monopusher crown that activates the city disc, 24-hour disc and centre hand, which Patek Philippe innovated back in 1999.

This is just the sort of thing one expects from a name like Patek Philippe. Small adjustment, incredible technical advancement. It’s not something that, on paper, looks exciting but, in an industry where progress seems to mean creating something that will garner column inches and Instagram likes, it is rare to find brands actually taking the time to use their R&D departments to address functional problems. Granted, the travails of transatlantic travel might not be on everyone’s list of problems, but if you’re able to wear the whole world on your wrist, shouldn’t you also be able to time it at the touch of a button?

Photography Rowan Corr