The extreme difficulty of making highly complex timepieces – including perpetual calendars, and perhaps the most challenging of all, chiming watches – made Audemars Piguet, from the beginning, one of only a tiny handful of companies capable of producing them, up to and including so-called “grand complication” timepieces, which combine chiming mechanisms such as the minute repeater and grande sonnerie with other complications. This degree and direction of specialization meant that production of watches at Audemars Piguet was very small relative to the industrially oriented watchmaking that dominated, and still dominates, much of the rest of the industry. Astonishingly, Audemars Piguet did not begin using the reference number system for serially produced watches until 1951; prior to that, every AP timepieces was essentially a unique piece and even afterwards, in many cases, series production meant the creation of just a handful of very labor-intensive timepieces, with meticulously crafted dials and cases as beautifully made as the mechanisms they housed.
from Best Watches For Men https://ift.tt/2JArTeE