On Whimsy, Novelty, And Innovation
A hard drive folder labeled "Mechanical Penguin Mating Videos" wasn't on my 2026 bingo card, but here we are.
The other day I got into an argument with a friend from work about whether or not there was such a thing as a sense of humor in watchmaking. The subject came up because in the course of the conversation, I happened to mention one of my favorite quotes about the luxury world in general, which is in Chandler Burr’s book, The Emperor of Scent. The subject of the book is scientist and perfume expert Luca Turin, a biophysicist who at one time worked at MIT on a project to produce an electronic nose, which project was funded by DARPA (make of that what you will). Turin at one point is talking about humor, and luxury, and how the two are generally speaking mutually inconsistent. I reproduce herein the entire quote both for its relevance to the larger discussion, and for its intrinsic interest to those of us who approach luxury and fine watchmaking from philosophical perspective.
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“Chic, is first, when you don’t have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn’t matter or because you don’t have any and it doesn’t matter. Chic is not aspirational. Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-- most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants.”
My own sense of the luxury industry and indeed of fine watchmaking is that it is in fact a largely humorless enterprise, although as I mentioned, my friend challenged me on the point. I have often found luxury brands to be forbiddingly humorless, although not entirely. They can be coercive when they feel that their brand equity is threatened (though when it comes to protecting brand equity luxury brands via tone-deafness, lack of imagination, and willful dismantling of their own heritage, are often their own worst enemies) which is to say of course that the people who work at luxury brands are often forbiddingly humorless, at least to the public and to the press. The general vibe seems to become even more oppressive and suffocating as prices climb, because naturally, spending gobs of money always feels more palatable if you feel as if you are engaged with something of great cultural importance. This may be why paying $6.2 million for a banana taped to a wall seems so outrageous; the only people who can afford to accept such a maneuver as a serious artwork – that is, who feel they’re in on the joke – seem to be those for whom six million dollars is a trivial sum, either personally or in terms of their usual milieu. The humorlessness of luxury may also have a lot to do with the absorption of luxury houses by multinational publicly traded conglomerates, for whom the necessity of protecting shareholder value filters out anything genuinely idiosyncratic. Thus we get fine watchmaking as we know it today: leadenly earnest, for all that it may be admirable for other reasons.
Perhaps we should be fair, though, and recognize that there is nothing about watchmaking on any level that lends itself to humor, although there are some exceptions. Culturally, watchmaking derives from a utilitarian need to know the time, largely in the service of a common framework for industry, transportation, the sciences, and the like, which are domains where the absence of humor is a feature, not a bug. To the extent that humor has existed in watchmaking it has existed as a highly niche alternative to watchmaking’s primary functions and to the extent that it’s actually worked, it’s worked when it runs counter to the generally pragmatic and practical aura of watchmaking. Character watches are a case in point. They are certainly manifestations of a certain kind of humor, or at least a manifestation of the lightheartedness of popular culture relative to luxury culture, and an inexpensive character watch can be chic in a way that a hand-finished six-figure time only watch cannot. (Sometimes, a watch with a sense of humor literally runs counter to convention in watchmaking; the “Backwards Goofy” character watches had hands which ran counterclockwise). But as a rule, the culture of watchmaking has not, historically, shown much of a sense of humor per se. Even during periods when mechanical horology existed largely as an entertainment for the wealthy rather than as an industry fulfilling a widespread need, its constructions were meant to evoke awe and amazement rather than conjure a chuckle (early watches and clocks with automata are a case in point).
Recently there have been two watches introduced which have the potential to tickle the funny bone. (We may pause here to remember the joke that the humerus is called the humerus because it is the funny bone). One of these two watches is inadvertently funny and is so thanks to a very lowbrow accidental pun. The watch in question is an automatic quarter repeater from Angelus, which is based on a virtually (cosmetically) identical watch originally made in only about a hundred pieces, in 1958.
The watch is I think quite lovely, and is available as a limited release from Angelus in both gold and steel and as far as these things can be judged from a brand produced video, the sound is not bad at all. Quarter repeaters are sort of a lost art nowadays, since brands which make repeaters generally prefer, it seems, to go all in and just do minute repeaters, although I wonder why the quarter repeater might not enjoy a resurgence at some point. After all, hour strikers like the Christopher Ward Bel Canto seem to have their fans, and simple and annual calendar watch sales are not harmed by anybody making otious comparisons to the perpetual calendar, so why not the quarter repeater? (Or the half-quarter repeater, even?) The only slightly odd thing about the release is that the watch has a solid caseback, and the brand press material doesn’t seem to include an image of the movement, although based on the image of the cadrature (under dial work) of the original there is not all that much to see anyway.
I said that there was only one odd thing about the release, although that is not entirely true; the other odd thing about it is the name. “Tinkler” was the name of the original model from 1958 and of course if the company were going to release a new version at all they cannot be faulted for using a legacy name, except for the fact that in the Anglophone world, “tinkler” unfortunately lends itself to a fairly lowbrow misinterpretation, based on the fact that “tinkle” can mean a pleasant jingling sound, but it can also be a euphemism for urinating. Let us pass with discreet haste to another subject.
On the Oh-Yes-They-DID side of things, on the other hand, we have an intriguing new-ish model (released April 1) from Nivada Grenchen, which is the Antarctic Erotic Watch. “Antarctic” and “Erotic” are not two words often seen in each other’s company and even less so as part of a ménage à trois with “Watch,” but Nivada has place all three together for what I am sure is the very first time in the five hundred year history of mechanical horology. The watch in question is quite soberly pragmatic in the grand tradition of horology as a practical art, when seen from the front.
… which is all well and good. However, flip the watch over and you will see two penguins having sex.
The penguins do not move unless you are hand-winding the watch, but when you do turn the crown, they spring into action thanks to a straightforward ratchet and pawl system.
This certainly seems to qualify as a stab at humor, albeit in keeping with the general tone of mechanical horology, it is rather deadpan humor. I think it works well though, on its own terms but also as a kind of parody of the genre of so-called erotic complications. The latter are as a rule, about as erotic when actually encountered, as a highway accident; this time around, penguins substitute for the Freudian-tinged spectacle of lifeless automata. Penguins are one of those animals, like the capybara, that it is hard to regard with anything but enjoyment. They eke out their existence with what looks for all the world like genuine relish, given the challenges of finding nourishment and companionship, and the constant risk of ending up as a snack for a leopard seal or orca, and while they are not as is commonly thought, monogamous, they are at least frequently serially monogamous, seeking out the same mate from one mating season to the next as long as they are available. Their courtship rituals are irresistibly endearing and males bring what they think are especially attractive pebbles as gifts, in an attempt to woo the female into accepting him as a mate.
The mating ritual is in contrast to actual mating, which is usually quite brief; penguins like all birds (and indeed, all dinosaurs, of which birds are a clade) have an opening called a cloaca which functions both as an excretory vent, and as a reproductive aperture and mating proper consists simply of the two participants approximating their cloacae; the act is over in seconds. The charm of penguins was acknowledged by the great John Ruskin, writer, artist, historian, and art critic, who in 1860 wrote:
“When I begin to think at all I get into states of disgust and fury at the way the mob is going on (meaning by mob, chiefly Dukes, crown princes, and such like persons) that I choke; and have to go to the British Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.”
I don’t think this necessarily disproves Luca Turin’s thesis that luxury has no sense of humor – for one thing at the price asked, this is not a luxury level timepiece, although inasmuch as a penguin-themed erotic watch is not remotely a necessity, it is at least in those terms – but it just goes to show you that humor and watchmaking can coexist, even if it does take a little imagination to make it work. As Edward Gwenn, the character actor, is supposed to have said on his deathbed when asked if dying was hard, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
Perhaps a thought on whimsy is apropos as we leave the subject. “Whimsy” is a word often used by a brand to mean something that presents horology in an aspirationally light-hearted way although the term has a kind of late Victorian flavor to it which seems a little formal for actual humor. (“I say old chap, look at that wristwatch. Tells the time with an hour hand in the shape of a songbird flying through the clouds. Deucedly whimsical, eh what?”) Whimsical and humorous are, I think, close cousins but not actually synonymous and whimsy in watchmaking can be extraordinarily expensive, with an air of underlying seriousness that distinguishes it from humor per se. The Antarctic Erotic Watch is not, if you ask me, whimsical but it’s pretty funny.
On another other note, in the course of pursuing the whole question of whether or not the Rolex Daytona 126502’s enamel dial is or is not “grand feu” enamel, I ran across a quite interesting patent. The patent is for exactly the process which Rolex says it used for its “grand feu” enamel dial (Rolex itself uses the term) which is vitreous enamel over a high performance modern technical ceramic, but the patent was not granted to Rolex, and it raises a number of interesting points, about the various enameling processes, the characteristics of ceramics, and what makes modern ceramics in watchmaking different from what we think of as ceramic in a conventional sense. First, however, some recommended reading:
“Wrist Laundromats” on Screw Down Crown. A great piece of reporting on the amazing scope and scale of using luxury watches for money laundering. The numbers were quite a bit bigger than I’d imagined.
“What CEH Invented After Beta 21” on Performance Watch Review. Did you know that Piaget may have brought to market, in 1975, an ultra-thin quartz movement regulated by an external time corrector (a kind of Sympathique) that worked by magnetic induction? Me neither.
“Beyond Spring Theory: A Quantum Of Realism” at Pointless Complications. Heavy on the math (surprise surprise) but deep on the surprising complexity of the most ignored but arguably most essential component in watchmaking: the mainspring and barrel.
And now, a look at enameling, and the evolution of the technical ceramics used in modern watchmaking.
A Swatch Group Patent For Enamel On Ceramic, And What Makes Modern Ceramics Practical And Versatile In Watchmaking.
The Rolex Daytona 126502 was announced as having a “grand feu” enamel dial, as anyone with even a casual interest in watchmaking probably already knows, and whether or not the term is correct in that context led to some spirited debate. While I don’t think this patent will alter anyone’s perspective, it still provides some additional interesting context and sheds some light on the technical challenges involved in vitreous enamel work in general.