Time Is precious and so are these timepieces

The new Tag Heuer Carrera Heuer-02T tour­billon wristwatch is drawing stares as much for its price—a relative bargain at $15,950—as for the masterpiece of engineering visible behind its face. 

The tourbillon, patented in 1801 by Abraham-Louis Breguet, is a gimbaled, rotating cage that holds the watch’s escapement and balance wheel and compensates for the effects of gravity on a watch’s movement. The precise compensatory effect may be only theoretical, but if accuracy is your main aim, you’d be better off with an iPhone, which will cost a whole lot less and keep even better time. 

What horologists have long celebrated is the engineering and manufacturing achievement the tourbillon represents. Only a few hundred tourbillons—initially designed for pocket watches—are thought to have been produced before the late 1990s. But given its reception, the Carrera Heuer-02T, with a tourbillon case of grade-five titanium, may significantly expand the market for these pace-setting products. 

Tag Heuer calls it “affordable haute horlogerie.” Admittedly, the same could have been said of the previously least-expensive tourbillon wristwatch, Montblanc’s 4810 ExoTourbillon Slim, at $34,500. In contrast, a top-end Greubel-Forsey Quadruple Tourbillon sells for $815,000, though with four of the mechanisms for enhanced gravity-defying accuracy, you’re paying only about $204,000 per tourbillon. 

But time isn’t ticking down on stratospheric tourbillons. Watchmaker Richard Mille has just released his RM 50-02 ACJ Tourbillon Split Seconds Chronograph, which was de­veloped in association with Airbus Corporate Jets (hence the ACJ in its appellation). Created to reflect the spirit of modern aircraft design, the RM 50-02’s tourbillon’s bridges and baseplate are grade-five titanium, the alloy used in the Carrera Heuer—and in the turbine blades of engines on ACJs. Parts within the movement have also been treated with an anticorrosive “special aeronautical coating.” 

The timepiece has functions more common to jets than wristwatches, including a torque indicator (providing data on the tension of the mainspring) and a power-reserve indicator. The RM 50-02 ACJ will appeal to purists who pine for the days when the tourbillon was a true rarity, as just 30 are available, priced at $1.3 ­million each.