Time Flies: Bucherer's New Heritage Worldtimer

Jet travel really ought to be filed under ‘miracles we take for granted’. What, after all, could be more romantic, more thrilling — more impossible-yet-doable — than being whisked through the air to far-flung destinations in a comfortable lounge-like setting in which food and wine is served, and doing so at roughly 40 times the speed that the steamships of yore once took to make the same journeys? 

In the 1950s, the world was still startled by the very idea that one could suddenly journey unfathomable distances to culturally alien shores in the time it once took to cross our relatively minuscule island of Britain by car. And so the culture around aviation — including the way people dressed for it — lived
up to its extraordinary reality, especially when it came to the watches that well-heeled itinerants wore, as moving between time zones became de rigueur (as early as 1931 Louis Cottier created a movement capable of showing all of the 24 time zones that had been introduced to the world back in 1884). 

As such, the 1950s and 1960s became known as aviation’s golden age. And, given that the best style codes to come out of the era also form the raison d’être of this publication, we were thrilled to discover that Carl F. Bucherer — whose reputation for drawing on watchmaking heritage while simultaneously tapping into the zeitgeist and pioneering for the future is unsurpassed — had turned to their archives from the 1950s to create the Heritage Worldtimer before you. 

The piece is a contemporary interpretation of one of the first watches to incorporate a second time zone, a feat it achieved via a case complication that deployed a simple gear train, operated by a second crown at nine o’clock, to drive a disk marked with city names. 

The new 30.6mm pieces offer yet another masterclass in balancing heritage with modernity (the names of cities on that aforementioned outer disk, for example, have been adjusted to reflect today’s key centres of gravity, but the font in which they’re written is faithful to the original). 

The culture around aviation, including the way people dressed for it, lived up to its extraordinary reality. 

The stainless-steel versions come with either a silver or black dial and engraved silver or rhodium-plated index markers respectively. Both admirably marry retro aesthetics with the mores of modern horology, and — whether you opt for the black wool strap or stainless steel bracelet — will look imperious peeping out from under shirt sleeves of either a casual or formal nature. But the iteration that’s caught our eye is the 18k rose-gold piece, limited to 88 pieces, which is graced with a double-domed sapphire crystal, sunray-brushed silver dial, baton-style hour and minute hands, and engraved rose-gold-plated indices. 

The words in the centre of the dial — ‘Chronometer’ and ‘33 Jewels’, replacing its predecessor’s dial statements, ‘Waterproof’ and ‘17 Jewels’ — offer tantalising statements of what’s within the case, but serious horology students are perhaps more intrigued by the 

in-house movement incorporating Peripheral Technology. For the uninitiated, this horological concept is one that Bucherer dived into in 2008, the year the manufacture launched a peripherally mounted automated winding system whose bi-directional oscillating weight, being unattached to the mainplate or bridges, rotates around the periphery of the movement instead of a centrally mounted rotor. This allows for an unobscured view of the movement via the sapphire caseback, bringing a new element of theatre to a concept — watch owners actually being able to see the micro-mechanical wizardry they’re buying — that began when the French clockmaker André- Charles Caron created the skeleton watch in the 1760s. 

The world’s finest watchmakers are notoriously discontent with existing achievements, and in 2018 Bucherer dazzled the watch- loving world with the ‘Double Peripheral’, which added a peripherally mounted ‘floating’ version of what was already the most intricate and elaborate innovation in watchmaking history, the tourbillon, to the whole marvel. Then, in 2021, the manufacture integrated a peripherally mounted minute repeater regulator, and the first ever ‘Triple Peripheral’ movement was born. Last year, CBF, as they are often known, released a Perpetual Calendar boasting a peripherally mounted automatic winding system. Needless to say, exceptional iterations of all these technical feats have followed — the gem-set Manero tourbillon double peripheral watch that CBF released earlier this year is a contender for the most aesthetically stunning piece of 2024 — and it is Peripheral Technology, and the way in which it makes a timepiece’s basic machinations almost float in thin air, that hikes the aesthetics into sublimity. 

All these pieces are especially beguiling to behold for those who are aware of just how much time and expertise has gone into them. “Peripheral Technology is astonishingly complex, and each complication takes years to perfect,” is how Samir Merdanovic, Carl F. Bucherer’s Chief Technology Officer, described the technology earlier this year. “The innate intricacy of these movements reveals our dedication to advancing the art of Swiss watchmaking and makes clear what we mean by ‘Exploring Time’,” he added, referring to the maxim that has become the philosophy of a brand that, in 2023, consolidated its timepieces into three families and increased its emphasis on high-end in-house manufactured timepieces. 

It’s impossible to imagine what protagonists of the jet-set age, such as Frank Sinatra and Richard Burton, would make of the beauty that this technical ingenuity imbues in the new Heritage Worldtimer. For just shy of two decades, the 46mm TravelTec model had been Carl F. Bucherer’s standard-bearing traveller’s piece. A new era — or golden age, if you will — has surely begun for aficionados of this manufacture who deem themselves members of the modern jet set. 

Read the full story in Issue 97, available now.