Location: St-Sulpice, Vaud, Switzerland
Date: Septembre 15, 2006
A personal highlight during my time at Tiffany & Co. was certainly the development of a unique timepiece named "The Tiffany Oracle".
At the beginning, the Tiffany management challenged us to create a mechanical timepiece which could live up to the fancy yellow diamond showcased at Tiffany's NY flagship store. The Tiffany Diamond is one of the largest and most celebrated fancy yellow diamonds in the world. The 287.42-carat rough stone was unearthed in South Africa in 1877 and acquired by Tiffany & Co. founder Charles Lewis Tiffany a year later.
How to challenge this crazy endeavor? The very first idea turned around a Tourbillon watch with a calendar counting the number of years since the foundation of the company.
On the day of October 18, after several sessions of brainstorming between Vicente Mafé and myself, some sort of an incredible idea started to emerge. The roots of the future Tiffany Oracle!
Since this day a development ballet started between the talented designer Steven Grotell and us which led to a project with multiple variations and versions.
We quickly identified the perfect partner to bring this project to life: Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier and its team. Because the patent of a central tourbillon was held by Swatch Group top notch brand Omega, we needed to switch from a wristwatch to a pocket watch concept and decentralize the Tiffany Oracle Tourbillon from the center of the timepiece.
The movement development evolved from week to week and the first components got assembled. Piece after piece the complexity increased until the first beats of the escapement...
A very nice detail is the T-shape tourbillon which takes full space of the opening. Each step of the production was closely supervised by the team.
The case of the pocket watch is made out of massiv 18K yellow gold just as the dial.
It took Vaucher Manufacture about 4700 hours of work to complete the "Tiffany Oracle" from the first technical drawing lines to the finished product. A one-of-a-kind technical masterpiece!
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