How Ressence is fusing traditional watchmaking and connectivity
The appearances of electronic components in mechanical watches have been fleetingly rare, and for good reason: the industry still exists in the long shadow of the quartz shockwave of the 1980s. Merging the mechanical with the electronic can still seem a step too far.
That makes a partnership between a Silicon Valley innovator - "Father of the iPod" Tony Fadell - and Belgium's creative watch firm Ressence all the more intriguing. Their co-invention, the e-Crown, is a genuinely original fusion of traditional watchmaking and connected technology: it takes electronic energy and uses it to allow the automated setting of a mechanical watch; assisting, rather than replacing, the normal crown.
It's now eight years since the industrial designer Beno?t Mintiens rocked the watch world with his first Ressence timepiece - a brand new take on the subject that saw the wristwatch redesigned from the inside out.
Without a traditional dial and hands, time was told via the pointers on three orbiting sub-dials set into a baseplate, which was itself continuously turning. This put the entire dial in a perpetual rotation. The magic behind this was ROCS - the Ressence Orbital Convex System - a 3D watch module driven by the minute axle of a self-winding watch movement, and a system still used in the Mintiens' project with Fadell, the Type 2 e-Crown.
The watch was conceived by Mintiens, and developed in collaboration with Fadell, a former Apple exec and founder of Nest Labs, a start-up that's focused on the automation of home energy. "Tony is one of the biggest Ressence collectors," says Mintiens. "When we were first introduced, I was in the fuzzy phase of the Type 2 e-Crown concept and I asked Tony if he would like to collaborate. And you know what? He said yes!"
Fadell was able to lay out the development path, the milestones, the challenges, and the critical points of the project upfront. Hence, the Type 2 e-Crown concept watch combines the best of both the mechanical and digital worlds, being not only precise, but also -(according to its creators) completely reliable in an unprecedented way.
The timekeeping of the watch relies on a standard automatic movement, modified to Ressence's specifications. The additional e-Crown module allows the watch to connect, via Bluetooth, to an app through which time is set automatically; it will also adjust itself for daylight savings and switch between different time zones.
The initial reference time is manually set by the wearer and the e-Crown checks the indicated time at least once a day and adjusts it if necessary. While the watch is not running, the e-Crown is dormant. It is reactivated when the watch is put back on the wrist, at which point it automatically resets to the correct time.
While the self-winding movement powers the watch's time-telling function, the e-Crown itself is powered by a combination of kinetic and solar energy. A generator stores energy produced by the movement of the automatic rotor; if power levels fall too low, 10 micro-shutters on the dial open, allowing light to recharge the back-up photovoltaic cells beneath.
And for those wary of too much "smart" input in their Ressence, there's the option of disabling the e-Crown to let the watch become a 100 per cent mechanically-powered timepiece.
So, could we be looking at the future of fine watchmaking? "I can't answer for others but at Ressence, we believe new generations are open to innovations - especially those that bring an enhanced experience to the table," replies Mintiens.
Ressence will soon be putting this theory to the test. At the time of writing, the e-Crown exists only as a functional prototype, but Mintiens assures Telegraph Time that a commercial version of the watch will be available by the end of this year.