The art in the hour

Swiss watchmaker Beat Haldimann is a quiet man but he seems content enough. And so he should be, judging by the success he’s had in stirring up enthusiasm among the world’s collectors. He’s the man who made time invisible, who let you choose your own time.

  He has a glorious mansion in Thun, an old Swiss town. The building overlooks the gothic Thun Castle and shares a bank of the serene Thun River. The mansion is where his workshop is, where Haldimann watches are made.

Beat Haldimann set up the shop in 1991 and 11 years later presented his first hand-made timepiece at the posh Basel Fair – the H1 Flying Central Tourbillon. It caused a sensation.
The reference guide Swisstime says any H1 Flying watch will now cost at least 150,000 Swiss francs (Bt5 million), and retailer Jurg Kirchhofer says some pieces cost 320,000 francs.

Since then there have been more models and more sensations – the H8 Sculptura, the H9 Reduction and the H2 Resonance.

Anyone with enough cash can buy a Haldimann timepiece – and everyone waits a year to get it, no matter how much cash he has. The reasons for the high prices and the slow delivery become clear on a visit to the workshop.

F Frisch is one of just eight watchmakers here, painstakingly hand-crafting every single component, right down to the seconds-hands as thin as a human hair. They also make and maintain their own tools. These people can etch microscopic motifs on a watch face and they can also cut and bend huge bars of steel and brass.

“We work on the small parts until our eyes get tired,” says Frisch, a 14-year veteran of the Haldimann workshop, “and then we either go somewhere else to rest and relax or make some new tools.”

The mansion’s first floor smells of machine oil, from gear that dates back well before the digital era. Beat Haldimann had to fend off antiques collectors to buy these nearly indestructible vintage engines and he’s proud that they not only still run, they run with precision.

Tools are neatly stowed in a big cabinet on the same floor. Raw materials and chemicals fill the basement. Any component they might not have when it’s needed can be produced on the spot.

One of the watchmakers examines a 17-millimetre-thick tourbillon case with a magnifying contraption that was made in the 1960s but remains dependably powerful. If the tourbillon passes inspection, he’s only got 300 more parts to scrutinise before he starts building a wristwatch.

It’s a craftsmanship that depends wholly on accuracy. The tiniest flaw in the tiniest metallic part, if overlooked, could ruin a precision in watch’s operation. Watchmakers knew this a hundred years ago and the best ones today don’t dare forget it.

The artisan places each small part on a surface beneath a glaring spotlight. The beam passes through a sophisticated arrangement of lenses and the little component appears projected on a huge, milky glass screen, magnified 1,000 times.

At other clock factories they use electronic microscope and computers, but Haldimann prefers this solid apparatus. It preserves the traditional charms of watchmaking, he says, and it also guarantees that every timepiece is individual and unique.

This is not to say that Beat Haldimann shuns advanced technology. For the H1, he took the tourbillon created in 1801 by Abraham-Louis Breguet – a mechanical marvel famous for its timekeeping reliability – and placed it in a cage that weights about as much as four postage stamps.

Haldimann also paid homage to the “singing ability” of Breguet’s old pocket watches. To most ears it’s just a ticking sound, but to him it’s music, “this fascinating sound, telling of earlier days, which gives a watch its heart”.

He set out to make the H2 Resonance as much an art object as an instrument for measuring time. The sweep of the movement catches the eye before the indication of the time.

Progressing to the obvious conclusion, the H8 Sculptura has no hands at all – no time to tell! There is only the movement. And confounding critics further, the H9 Reduction does have a display of the hours and minutes – but you can’t see it because it’s hidden behind opaque glass. Buyers were encouraged to imagine their own time.

Beat Haldimann’s audacious concepts arose from a passion that was first ignited by a man he knew as a youngster. His house was on Beat’s way to school, and the boy would drop in to watch him make tiny watch parts. He became the craftsman’s apprentice and soon decided he could and would create his own masterpieces.

Since opening his own workshop, he’s completed about 100 timepieces. And during that time he discovered that his name already adorned a number of watches and clocks. It turned out that his family had been in the business in the 17th century!

Beat Haldimann decided from the start that his timepieces would be “a magnificent blend of art and technology, combining craftsmanship and intellect”. But what could be next, now that time has been rendered invisible, just part of the imagination?

Haldimann says he wants to build a watch that is the epitome of simplicity. And to find out what that means, we’ll just have to give him time.