During a dinner in New York in 2001, the Swiss businessman Rolf Schnyder and the watchmaking wunderkind Ludwig Oechslin presented an outlandish-looking gold watch that lacked a dial, crown, and traditional hands. Instead, it indicated the time with an enormous minute hand that also doubled as the movement and a rotating main plate that served as the hour hand. To set the time, you simply turned the bezel.
The radical visible design of the model, appropriately named Freak, made it easy to overlook its equally avant-garde insides: The movement incorporated silicon, a watch world first. The material has since revolutionized mechanical watchmaking by eliminating the need for lubricants like oil. Technically innovative and so wild looking that it could be described as “exotic," the Freak gave the middle finger to horological conventional wisdom at a time when the postmodern mechanical watchmaking renaissance was barely a decade old. In doing so, it paved the way for an era of superwatches that have redefined what a wristwatch looks like and how it should function.
From the article by Allen Farmelo, Paige Reddinger, Victoria Gomelsky, Oren Hartov, Blake Buettner
