Housed in a watch connected to a suitcase that looks like a president’s with the ultimate weapon, the atomic precision that Félix Baumgartner and Martin Frei celebrate manages to transfer to a mechanical oscillator.

Joël A. Grandjean, JSH Magazine & Swiss-Watch-Passport.ch’s Editor in chief
Follow us Linkedin – Facebook – Insta JSH – Insta SWP – Subscribe to JSH

Flash back! Félix Baumgartner, co-founder of Urwerk and founding father of nouvelle horlogerie, was trained as a restorer of antique timepieces as were today’s most ingenious inventors of complicated calibers. He propels the original values of his first model, the UR-101, beyond the “Millennium Falcon” fuselage, the Star Wars starship. “Urwerk’s AMC breaks the limits of mechanical watchmaking and restores the oscillator to the pinnacle of chronometry.”

Urwerk: “The mechanical oscillator isn’t perfect, perhaps it never will be, but, when coupled with its atomic reference, it has the ability to self-perfect.“

How to physically materialize two fascinating concepts of excellence: mechanical beauty and atomic accuracy? Avant-garde and visionary, the brand created a project consisting of a mechanical watch, the AMC, and an atomic clock, at the leading edge of technological time. It opens up a hitherto unimaginable connection between the time of the balance-spring and the anchor escapement and the time of this Atomolithe, a kind of “suitcase” containing a 35 kg atomic pendulum housed in an aluminum case with measurements roughly similar to those of a medium-sized computer tower.

Félix Baumgartner: “establishing a point of convergence between these two devices, teaching these singular and complex mechanisms to interact”