Forty Kilometres Up
Imagine a place forty kilometres above the ground. That thin, silent layer where the air has almost run out, where the sky turns from deep blue to dark velvet and then to near-black, where beneath you the curve of the Earth begins to appear: the stratosphere. Storms stop here; the clouds stay below. Humankind first touched this cold and desolate region in 1931.
That year, the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard, born in Basel, climbed into a spherical cabin made of aluminium and, beneath a hydrogen balloon, rose to a height no human had ever reached, to nearly sixteen kilometres. A Swiss had defied the ceiling of the sky. But what if you could carry a piece of that ascent, a sphere drifting above gravity, on your wrist? This is precisely what Jaeger-LeCoultre's Gyrotourbillon à Stratosphère promises.
The Extremes of a Dynasty
Auguste Piccard was not alone; he was the founder of a dynasty. His son Jacques Piccard went in exactly the opposite direction to his father's climb, down to the very bottom of the sea: in 1960, aboard the submersible Trieste, he reached eleven kilometres beneath the surface, to the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench. And the grandson Bertrand Piccard flew around the world with Solar Impulse, burning not a single drop of fuel, on solar power alone. A single Swiss family reached for the highest, the deepest and the farthest. Their common enemy was the same: limits, and gravity.
Jaeger-LeCoultre, too, is another Swiss legend that has fought that same enemy since 1833 in the harsh mountain valley of the Vallée de Joux. And this watch, à Stratosphère, is the maison's most audacious answer to gravity.
The First Watch of a New Era: Hybris Inventiva
The Master Hybris Inventiva Gyrotourbillon à Stratosphère opens the door to a new era in the maison's 190-year history: Hybris Inventiva, the first watch of Jaeger-LeCoultre's most experimental, most boundary-less collection. Beneath the blue, skeletonised dial of this white-gold watch, made in only 20 pieces, beats the maison's Calibre 178 and one of the most extraordinary tourbillons in the history of watchmaking.
Not a Carousel, but a Gyroscope
You have heard many times what a tourbillon does: it averages out gravity's disturbing effect on the balance wheel by turning the wheel. But here is the secret: an ordinary tourbillon does this in a single plane only, in two dimensions. Your wrist, however, turns, tilts and swings in three dimensions throughout the day. A single-axis cage can compensate for only a few of the countless angles your wrist takes.
Jaeger-LeCoultre's answer is not a carousel, but a gyroscope. Just like the spinning gyroscopes that keep a rocket or an aircraft on course through the turbulence of the stratosphere, at the heart of this watch sit three separate, nested titanium cages: a tourbillon within a tourbillon, and within that yet another tourbillon. These three cages turn along the X, Y and Z axes, and moreover at three different speeds: the innermost cage completes a full rotation in 20 seconds, the middle one (the 'cage of reference') in 60 seconds, and the outermost in 90 seconds. The result: the balance wheel passes through 98 per cent of all the positions it can possibly take. Gravity, in other words, can never catch it at a fixed angle. This is the most precise tourbillon Jaeger-LeCoultre has ever made.
Three Different Tempos, an Endless Dance
These three different tempos create a dance that mesmerises the eye upon the dial: the sphere never repeats the same silhouette, turning endlessly like a different cluster of stars every second. But beneath this beauty lies a colossal engineering trial. To nest three cages within one another and keep them all so light that a single mainspring can turn all this rotating mass without any loss of precision, the cages are carved from titanium as light as a feather. The energy must reach the balance wheel through this labyrinth turning on three separate axes without being lost along the way. Of the movement beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour (4 Hz), this tourbillon module alone is made of 189 tiny parts.
A Laboratory of Gravity
Such a miracle is possible only with two centuries of accumulated knowledge. Jaeger-LeCoultre is the 'Grande Maison' that has gathered, for more than 190 years in the Vallée de Joux, over 430 patents, more than 1,400 calibres and 108 separate crafts under a single roof. That spherical cage is assembled by hand under the microscope, with tweezers and endless patience; the edge of every titanium ring is finished by hand, and every opening in the blue skeleton dial is designed to let the light in. This is less a watch than a laboratory of gravity that fits in the palm of your hand.
Living the Ascent to the Sky in Your Palm
Auguste Piccard rose into the stratosphere to climb above the storms and touch the edge of space. Jaeger-LeCoultre, in turn, raised onto your wrist a sphere that drifts ceaselessly above gravity. Only 20 people will carry this piece of the stratosphere: a tiny gyroscope, turning without pause, that refuses to bow to the one force that governs us all, gravity. When you raise your arm and watch that sphere turn, you relive, in the palm of your hand, a human being's ascent to the sky.
