Supreme Sacred Ring, Carefree Tycoon!
In the 80s, a good-quality old Hainan Huanghuali round-backed armchair from the Qing Dynasty could be yours for just twenty yuan. Now, two million yuan o...
Lying on the big bed in an ungraceful manner, Yang Jing pressed the extremely precious watch tightly against his chest with both hands. It took him a long time to calm his heart that was about to jump out of his throat.
Yang Jing didn't even dare to look at the watch carefully, for fear that his eyes would be pierced by it and he wouldn't be able to pull them out.
From the first moment he saw the watch, Yang Jing was certain that it was a Patek Philippe Platinum World Time watch, and it was made by Master Louis Cottier himself.
There is no other reason, you can tell this just by looking at the unique shape of the second hand.
The works of Master Louis Cottier have a distinctive feature, that is, the unusual shape of the hands, especially the hour hand, which is completely handmade, and the hands in each watch are slightly different. This has become the "signature" of Master Louis Cottier that distinguishes him from other watches.
And this characteristic of Master Lewis Cottier is also unique in the world!
This precious world time watch has a case diameter of 39.5 mm and a black strap. Most importantly, whenever Yang Jing sees the unique black and white 24-hour dial, his heart will beat faster involuntarily.
This is a Patek Philippe Platinum World Time watch!
Even before I discovered this watch, everyone in the world believed that there was only one of this watch.
Even Master Louis Cottier never said during his lifetime that he had ever made a second watch of this type.
But in fact, the three pieces of letter paper that appeared with this watch proved that Master Lewis Cottier had indeed made a watch of the same model in the past, and also revealed a little-known past of Master Cottier.
In the watch industry, when mentioning Master Louis Cottier, everyone will say that he is a watchmaking genius who is ahead of his time!
When talking about this master watchmaker, we have to talk about world clocks.
In the early 19th century, the prototype of world time was still vague. With the deepening of the Second Industrial Revolution, with the invention of trains, ships and cars, human beings have become more and more capable of breaking through spatial limitations, making travel between two far-flung cities relatively easy. At the same time, with the invention of the telegraph, instant communication around the world has become possible, which requires the world to unify the setting of time.
In particular, one day during that era, trains from two cities at different times collided due to poor time coordination. For this reason, the railway engineer Shanford Fleming, who was employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway at the time, decided to change the status quo.
In 1876, Sandford Fleming suggested that the world time be divided into 24 zones, with each zone of 15 degrees of longitude being the same, and named after 24 of the 26 English letters excluding "J, Y". At first, people did not realize the importance of world time, because after all, only businessmen or workers like him needed world time. As he spared no effort to spread the word, the concept of world time was finally recognized at the International Meridian Conference in 1884.
The world's first dual time zone pocket watch that was subsequently created was called "Captain's-watches" and was mainly used by train drivers.
As the creators of time, watchmakers have been committed to exploring the secrets of simultaneously displaying the time of multiple regions or even the whole world since the concept of world time was promoted.
World time was first used in pocket watches, but the originator of modern world time watches is the world time zone mechanism invented by Master Cottier in 1935.
A world time watch is a type of time zone watch that can display the time of more than 24 cities. It is the most complex time zone watch and is the well-deserved all-rounder among time zone watches. By displaying 24 different time zones around the world and adjusting the main cities pointed to on the dial scale to the local time, holding a world time watch is like holding the pulse of the world, and 24 hearts beating at the same time indicate every corner of time.
On September 28, 1894, Maestro Cottier was born in Carouge, Geneva, a small place in Sardinia under the rule of the Bourbon dynasty.
Cottier's father, Emmanuel, was already a well-known watchmaker at the time and owned a small workshop in Rue Saint-Victor, Switzerland.
When Cottier grew up, he studied at the Geneva Watchmaking School. Because he was good at repairing complex watches, he was recommended by the famous watch historian Alfred Chapuis to Hans Wilsdorf, the founder of Rolex, and was commissioned to repair and maintain the precious antique watches in his collection.
It turns out that this period of professional learning had a profound impact on Kottier, and he benefited greatly in the following years, especially during the Great Depression. After completing his studies, he served as a technical instructor in several local factories. After the economic crisis in the late 1920s, many factories were forced to reduce production, and the factories he served went bankrupt. At this time, Kottier decided to start his own business amid internal and external troubles.
At that time, in Rouvotiers, near Carouge, Switzerland, Cottier's wife opened a stationery store. In the studio behind the stationery store, Cottier worked for 13 years. Here, he began to make table clocks, pocket watches, watches and hand-made movement molds. Most of the watches he made were special jumping digital watches and automatic watches that were rare at the time. In 1931, it was in this workshop that Cottier made the first world time zone pocket watch for a famous watch and jewelry store called Beszanger.
After continuous design and production, Cottier gradually became an expert in world time zone watches. He designed works for many watch factories in Geneva, and these works all have the same characteristics.
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