Why Are Tourbillon Watches So Expensive?

There’s a curious contraption that you’ll find gracing the most expensive watches in the world. All at once useless, prestigious, controversial and dazzling, this is the extolled tourbillon — and even the cheapest examples of watches featuring it mostly cost well into five figures.

Many are fascinated by the motion of a mechanical watch’s balance wheel as it manically twitches back and fourth, regulating timekeeping. But the tourbillon takes that mechanism and its hypnotic animation and ups the ante (and complexity) by placing the oscillating wheel in a structure that simultaneously rotates it. Beguiling to behold, it’s considered the apex of watchmaking prowess and a symbol of opulence. Why? And what does it even do?

The Invention of the Tourbillon

In the late 1700s, famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet came to the realization that gravity was having ill effects on the accuracy of his timepieces. Horology at the time was confined to clocks and pocket watches, the latter of which were constantly stored vertically in the user’s pocket or horizontally on a table. Spending the majority of its time stuck in these orientations put strain on the hairspring inside the escapement, causing it to oscillate at an irregular rate, decreasing the accuracy of the watch.

Breguet’s solution was to create an escapement (the structure that regulates timekeeping and which you can often see oscillating through display casebacks even on basic mechanical watches) that was itself constantly in a state of motion. Given the name of the French word for “whirlwind,” the tourbillon housed the escapement in a rotating cage that, because of the constant motion, was intended to average out the effect of gravity when the watch was in different positions.

The Prestige and Irony of the Tourbillon in Modern Watches

Breguet’s invention worked for the pocket watch. But wristwatches, with the wearer’s relatively constant movement, naturally offer the same gravity-fighting effect as the tourbillon mechanism. In fact, it’s been proven that tourbillons offer no more accuracy than a traditional escapement on a wristwatch, and in some cases even less.

Courtesy

The tourbillon had largely been a forgotten horological curiosity, until Omega used the mechanism in a wristwatch movement for the first time in 1947. It was genuinely intended to improve performance in observatory trials, rather than “for show,” but it wasn’t a solution that generally took off in the industry. Decades later, however, the idea of prominently displaying the tourbillon on a watch’s dial caught on — watchmaker Franck Muller claimed to have pioneered the concept in 1984.

In spite of the tourbillon’s evident uselessness, it’s become common among the upper echelon of the watch market. Most Swiss-made examples start at around $30,000 and price tags often break the six-figure barrier. You’ll find that many of the most expensive modern watches that cost well into six figures (and sometimes even more) at least include a tourbillon.

So, Why the Stratospheric Prices for Tourbillons?

Take all the factors that generally make mechanical watches expensive and turn them up to eleven. Tourbillons are among the most difficult features for watchmakers and require expert hand assembly. The tourbillon mechanism is tiny, weighing in at under a gram, and is usually crafted with more than 40 parts, typically finished by hand and made from lightweight metals like aluminum and titanium. Tourbillons require a special set of tools and a lot of time to make — by only the most highly trained craftspeople. At least, that’s the way toubillons are traditionally made and understood.

Zen Love

Due to the cost of these features and their eye-catching complexity, they’ve become a prestige symbol that many watchmakers choose to display right on the dial. It’s a little ironic that the tourbillon has become part of almost every high-end watchmaker’s repertoire. Just about any watch brand operating in the “haute horlogerie” space will make this feature part of their halo product offerings — to the point that the tourbillon might not seem that exotic anymore.

The Tourbillon’s Evolving Saga

Unsurprisingly, the tourbillon’s status has also created the drive for brands to offer more affordable versions. Some Swiss brands are even in this game, and manufacturers in China have managed to create respectable tourbillon movements that retail for under $5,000. Meanwhile, you’ll find brands you’ve never heard of selling tourbillon watches for hundreds rather than thousands.

“Today we have production methods which allow us to produce spare parts in extremely high precision and acceptable quality,” independent haute watchmaker Thomas Prescher said in an interview with Europa Star. “So it is already possible to have extremely cheap tourbillons from the Far East for about $250.”

So, if the value of a tourbillon stems from the fact that it is essentially kinetic art — painstakingly crafted expressions of the pinnacle of watchmaking, even if they don’t have any real useful function — affordability comes at the cost of creating a less complex and less beautiful timepiece. It renders a mostly pointless feature even more pointless, even if it still looks cool.

Related Topics