Greubel Forsey Quadruple Tourbillon Watch

Four tourbillons all work together with a differential to display the mean time between them all. That is the idea behind this Quadruple Tourbillon (also known as the "Experimental Watch No. 2") timepiece from watch novelty maker Greubel Forsey. Even though a watch only needs one escapement, this watch takes a few of them, and then basically rounds them all out (as they each deviate marginally from each other). Using this mean timing, Greubel Forsey indicates that this is of the most accurate tourbillon watches ever. That may be so, but this is a novelty watch if there ever was one. Consider it one of those parlor showpieces for the elite, and that is just fine. These creations are marvels to behold, and stunning examples of luxurious excess and quixotic engineering.

The four tourbillon movements are separated into two cages. Basically, each cage has a tourbillon within a tourbillon. A spherical differential takes all that power and transmits it to the movement in order to tell the time. There is a video located at Greubal Forsey's website showing what is hard to describe in words. The complex movement is manually wound and housed in a 43.5mm wide 18k rose gold case (which has side sapphire windows for more visuals into the movement. The watch dial is made of blackened gold, while the functions include the time with hours, minutes, seconds, and a power reserve indicator (nicely integrated into the subsidiary seconds dial. The larger tourbillon cage has a ring with numbers up to 240. This represents seconds, and counts 4 minutes; the time it takes the large tourbillon cage to make one revolution. Look for the official release at Baselworld soon.

Ariel Adams publishes the watch review site aBlogtoRead.com.