the find
− 0.6 mA mechanical watch that exists only as software, and is specified as if it were going to be made. A 42 mm platinum case; a movement of 18k rose-gold plates under Côtes de Genève; 4 Hz — 28,800 beats an hour, eight a second. At six o'clock a tourbillon of three nested titanium cages turning once in 60, 75 and 35 seconds on a single degree of freedom, its pattern repeating every 2,100 seconds, driven by a coaxial constant-force carriage that re-arms once a second. A moon phase with two moons at twelve, a jumping date at three, a power reserve at nine: 192 hours, eight days, of constant force from four mainsprings in series.
The dial is brass finished as pale stone — six octaves of relief noise — with hip-roofed platinum batons standing on feet through it. The hands are blued steel. The only mark anywhere on the watch is a monogram — a P with a T slotted through it — in black-polished platinum below the moon, and in relief on the crown.
324 distinct parts, 606 pieces, 35 jewels, 79 screws. Every one is modelled, placed and finished.
cross-section
− 1.3 mThe watch was a plan before it was a program: twelve documents covering the calibre, the tourbillon, the going train, the physics of oscillator and escapement, friction and lubrication across 134 contacts, the dial and case, the finishing and light, the software and the sound. Every number lives in one design file; twenty calculation scripts derive and assert them, and the app reads the same data rather than literals.
The viewer is three.js on WebGPU with a WebGL 2 fallback, physics in a worker, and the finishing modelled optically — anglage, perlage, black polish, bluing from a baked thin-film table. It ships as one self-extracting HTML file of about 2 MB that unpacks itself in the browser, works offline, and is forbidden by its own security policy from making a single network request.
It is honest about itself. Twelve millimetres could not hold the design; the watch is 14.815 mm, with the metal kept at 10.95 and the rest given to a domed sapphire. The constant force is not perfectly constant — amplitude drifts from 276.8° to 290.9° over the reserve — and the app shows that drift rather than hiding it.
inscription
− 2.0 mField note, from the change log: The seconds hand was retired before it was ever built. Seconds are read instead from a red-lacquered triangle riding the outer cage, against a platinum ring set into the dial — so the tourbillon itself is the seconds hand, stepping 0.75° eight times a second, 480 steps to the minute. To make the cage turn clockwise, the going train gained a reversing idler of 53 teeth, and the escapement, stop wheel and pawl were laid out as mirror images of themselves.
The blued hands were first coloured with 62 nm of oxide film; under the dial light they read azure. The approved royal blue is 52 nm. The sound has its own honesty: the reference watch's beat could not be lawfully sampled, so the recording bank was built and ships empty, waiting for a consented recording. Until then the tick is real watch recordings under open licences and modal synthesis, and the once-a-second accent comes from the simulated mechanism.