Tourbillon – What Are They?

Watch enthusiasts know that tourbillon watches are far more expensive than conventional watches, be they skeletal, mechanical, or automatic. But why? What makes a tourbillon that much more expensive? It all has to do with what’s inside the watch.

Mechanical watches have a tendency to lose time for various reasons, but it all comes down to the fact that they function purely on the craftsmanship of the parts that make it run in the first place; there are no batteries and there is no quartz crystal resonance to maintain near-perfect time-keeping. Every single little part inside the watch is dependent on one another while driven by the mainspring, which is quite amazing when you think about it. Just imagine the intense attention to detail required to create a hand-made mechanical timepiece. But no matter how well-crafted the timepiece, they can still lose time due to factors like gravity and the movement of our arms as we walk. That’s where the tourbillon comes in.

A tourbillon is an additional part added to a mechanical watch and serves to counteract the effects of gravity.  Pocket watches and wrist watches suffer from effects of gravity because they are worn or carried in one position throughout the day (vertical), but would be placed in a different position when read. This change in position also changes the way gravity affected the parts of the watch, which then cause variations in the movement. A tourbillon functions by mounting the escapement and the  balance wheel in a rotating cage. As a result, the escapement and balance wheel would always be pointing the same direction, making the watch more accurate. This extra bit of effort and craftsmanship is what makes a tourbillon more expensive than a conventional watch.