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Graham is a company with some very different faces. If you know the company at all, it’s probably thanks to the Chronofighter series of chronographs, which have a left-handed crown, with a love-it-or-hate it trigger system for starting and stopping the chronograph, and a separate button for re-set. This watch is not one of those watches. Not even close.
Personally I’ve always kind of liked the Chronofighter – sure, it’s a niche product, but they’re an awful lot of fun to play with and in a world of me-too chronographs it’s always nice to see someone doing something different. The Chronofighter series has been a successful one for Graham and over the years they’ve come in an absolute plethora of designs – some better than others but for sure, if you’re a Chronofighter fan you’ve been spoiled for choice. My personal favorite is probably the Chronofighter Classic, which has always struck me as exactly the sort of watch that’d be worn by some nutty 1920s-era aviation or automotive pioneer…maybe this guy.
However, Graham also makes complicated watches and the most complex is the Geo. Graham Orrery Tourbillon. The watch was originally introduced in 2013, and it takes design cues from the general movement configuration you’d have seen in the watches made by George Graham, as well as other English makers, in the 17th and early 18th centuries. (Graham, the modern company, has no connection with George Graham, by the way, who is famous for his many contributions to precision horology as well as for his generous support of John Harrison; he died in 1751 and I do wish the modern Graham would drop the “Watchmakers Since 1695” business.) The Orrery Tourbillon has a central tourbillon with a bridge inspired by the pierced and engraved balance cocks found in watches from the early to mid-1700s, and also features a mechanical orrery – a working model of the orbital relationships of the Earth, Moon, and Mars with respect to the Sun.
Mechanical planetariums are pretty old (the oldest known is the Antikythera Mechanism, which is an astonishingly complicated ancient Greek planetarium and mechanical calendar that dates to around 200 BC). The word “orrery” comes from the name of Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, to whom one such planetarium was presented in 1704. The movement for the Geo. Graham Orrery Tourbillon was designed and manufactured by Christophe Claret.
In the original watch from 2013, the heavenly bodies were represented by small spherical gemstones. In this latest version, the Earth is represented by a globe of turquoise, while the Moon and Mars are represented by polished meteorite fragments, take from meteorites which originated from the Moon and Mars, respectively. (The Martian meteorite was named the Tissint Meteorite and it fell in Morocco in 2011; the lunar meteorite is Northwest Africa 4881, which was discovered in 2005.) The Sun is represented by the ornate gold tourbillon bridge with its conspicuous diamond endstone. You can also see, roughly, what month we’re in from the position of the Earth, and you can also see through which sign of the Zodiac the Sun appears to be passing, as seen from the Earth.
The caseback shows the movement bridges, and there’s also a calendar covering a 100 year period. This shows when it will be necessary to use the manual correctors set into the case, to adjust the positions of Mars and the Moon; the disk is mechanically driven and makes one full rotation per century. Two additional disks are provided for a total of 300 years of correction information. The current year is highlighted in blue.
Wristwatch planetariums are pretty rare – they’re kept in production by very few companies, even ones that make other astronomical complications. The Van Cleef & Arpels Midnight Planetarium is one example; another is the Christiaan Van Der Klaauw Planetarium. (The ancestor of pretty much all modern wristwatch planetariums is probably Ulysse Nardin’s Planetarium Copernicus, which showed the orbits of all the planets out to, and including, Saturn, and which was released all the way back in 1988 as part of the Trilogy of Time series, a.k.a. The Most Amazing Astronomical Watches You Probably Forgot About.)
Thanks to their rarity and complexity, wristwatch planetariums tend to be expensive too; the Van Cleef & Arpels Midnight Planetarium, for example, was priced at $ 250,000 at release. Graham’s Orrery Tourbillon was original priced at $ 330,000, which will be the price of this new version as well.
The Geo. Graham Orrery Tourbillon: hand-wound mechanical planetarium with tourbillon, showing the relative positions of Mars, the Moon, and the Earth relative to the Sun. Case, pink gold, 48mm x 17.60mm; caseback with 100-year scale showing years requiring corrections of the positions of Mars and the Moon. Double phoenix head gold tourbillon bridge with diamond cabochon. More information on the Orrery Tourbillon at graham1695.com.
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