The watch you are looking at took years to make and is one of the most complicated watches ever made.
You can see it for free over the next two days. Then it is headed to New York and then back to its home in the Breguet Museum in Paris.
However even if you miss it, you will not miss the point of this post.
Assuming you are a not a watch nut like I am, we will keep the technical jargon and watch talk to a minimum.
This is a very cool and interesting watch which is EXTREMELY VALUABLE and is VERY famous.
After reading about it many times, I finally laid eyes on it today for the first time and that wouldn’t have been possible except in a really big city like Los Angeles.
It just isn’t worth the risk and expense for the company to take it to destinations where few people would be interested in this sort of thing.
In essence when anything goes on tour, the more specialized the interest, the fewer stops they make on the tour.
When you make fewer stops they are usually the biggest stops and places like London, Paris, New York and LA seem to always make the tour other big cities don’t.
If you owned a chain of high-end watch boutiques and had only one very special and really expensive watch to sell, you would place it in the store where it is most likely to be sold.
This gives New York an advantage over LA but we have the upper hand in weather and size. It is much harder to hold car shows in Manhattan but in either case we enjoy more big concerts and tours of rare things than smaller cities.
Now a little about the watch.
A guard of Marie Antoinette asked one of history’s greatest watchmakers to create a watch more elaborate and complicated than any other watch in the world as a gift for his queen.
It took Breguet 44 years to complete the watch. Unfortunately, Marie never saw her gift because she died before it was finished.
The watch is what they call a repeater which means it has chimes which tell you what time it is after you push the button.
It also has a thermometer.
It doesn’t need to be adjusted for months with 30 days or even leap year.
The list of complicated features it has goes on and on.
Basically it was the most complicated and finest watch ever made for hundreds of years!
The watch went through a lot of different hands until it was stolen from a museum in Israel many years ago.
With the original lost to history, The Breguet Company began to recreate the historic watch from specs, drawing, pictures and other info they had.
It took them about 4 years to finish and as they neared completion Breguet began to announce their accomplishment. Many articles were written about the original Marie Antoinette watch to explain the significance of the recreated watch.
It isn’t an easy watch to make under the best conditions. Making it exactly as it was without the original to use as a model is simply amazing.
It is impossible to capture the beauty of the watch in film because of it looks too busy. It looks far better in person than any of the many photographs I have seen.
Right before this watch was to make its big debut the original surfaced. That is another whole long story but all I need to know, is the original is back in Israel and it is doubtful I will ever see it.
Seeing this watch is still a real treat because I have read so much about it and I don’t imagine myself going to its home in Paris just to see it.
If you do go see it check out the other watches they have. They are some of the most beautiful watches you will ever see. One goes for well over a million dollars.
I feel like I just got back from a free world class watch museum.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on Wilshire Blvd. is a great place to visit, especially for fans of older films.
