Introduction to Chiming Watches

Musical watches of all types have successfully captured the imagination of watchmakers and collectors for hundreds of years. Even historical and modern writers view these horological creations as irresistible and prestigious icons for their characters to use. Several of Tolstoy’s personages use them; vampires dally with them, as do real-life presidents, generals and queens. In fact there is even a contemporary novel written about that most famous of royal musical watches supposedly ordered for Marie Antoinette. “The Grand Complication” by Allen Kurzweil is a fantasy suspense story that has all the correct facts about the unfortunate queen and the epic history surrounding her belatedly delivered repeater pocket watch.

Before the use of luminous materials for dial markings were discovered, before gaslights and electricity were around, a watch that could tell the time in the dark was really something special, exceptional, rare and expensive. Today, with few exceptions, the real necessity of hearing the time is long past, yet the interest in musical watches has not diminished, constantly increasing each decade since the rebirth of the mechanical watch industry. So what is the driving force behind this fascinating obsession?

For watchmakers, musical watches such as the grande sonnerie, petite sonnerie and minute repeater are by and large the most complex to make of any type of watch. Just imagine creating, finishing, assembling and adjusting what can easily be a thousand parts (especially if another function is included with the repeater) and at the same also have a good ear.

Repeaters are the kind of pieces that you have to learn about by apprenticing with another, older and experienced watchmaker—even if you have followed the highest courses for complications at WOSTEP or elsewhere. So being able to deal with a watch like this puts you at the forefront of your profession as a watchmaker and is a medal of honor proving your ability.

Such watches hold many challenges for any watchmaker. Their large number of small parts with complicated shapes engaging with each other can easily wreak havoc by a pileup of friction. The mechanism can jam with just one incor- rect tolerance somewhere. The winding barrel’s energy has to provide the base movement as well as all the myriad parts of the chiming mechanism with sufficient energy, any change of which can easily endanger chronometric results since the amplitude of the balance wheel will change when the chiming functions are operative. Particularly for a grande sonnerie (see below) that might be chiming throughout the day, many brands use a double barrel system, which consequently diminishes the cramped available space even further.

A chiming watch also needs to sound clear and sonorous, no small issue when confronted with the minimal dimensions of the watchcase within which everything must work, especially the small gongs occupying a cramped place between the movement and the interior wall of the case. Various metals are used for the gongs, which can be made of one piece or soldered, round or shaped, flat, square or round in cross section. These are just a few of the issues cloaked with an aura of mystery, hidden under the dial within a chiming watch mechanism.

Challenges like these were already extreme for pocket watch repeaters, but for wristwatches the tolerances and difficulties increase exponentially, making such watches a real Mount Everest of watchmaking. Despite the thousands of watchmakers at work in the world, inside and outside Switzerland there are only perhaps fifty individuals who can skillfully cope with the assembling of such highly complex movements.

What’s more, I’m aware of only 2 or 3 independent watchmakers able to design and make such watches fully on their own and only about five companies exist that in reality can design and manufacture the parts for such chiming movements totally on their own as well -  and two of those supply the movements for most major brand players. That’s how difficult these types of watches are to produce.

PRICE AND DEMAND

Thus follows the next obsession: price. With all the work involved, the price is also concurrently astronomical and is generally speaking among the highest within any specific collection or within the offerings of your favorite watch emporium.

That being stated, the creation of new musical watches (I am using this term to mean all the different forms available), despite all the difficulties stated earlier, has today been simplified with the use of computer software.

In the 21st century, chiming movements containing up 1,000 parts can be engineered, constructed and even partially tested in specialist horological software drawing programs at speeds perhaps 10 times faster than the tempo of such work in previous centuries.

This has led to a large number of new chiming watch designs that reach the market on an almost yearly basis. Stand still for a moment that up until the computer age, all firms relied solely on supersized drawings created first in pen and pencil then reduced down in size to the final caliber dimensions with a pantograph…Under these conditions, the creation of a new sonnerie, repeater or even a chronograph movement was a gargantuan undertaking, something to really remember and respect when viewing chiming timepieces from the past.

MANY VARIETIES

There exist a multitude of chiming watch- es from the past and present, some more unique than others, and there have been many experiments throughout the cen- turies as well, so it is impossible to cover every ‘flavor’ of chiming watch ever made here; the decimal repeater is a perfect example of such a particularly interesting and lesser known type of chiming watch.

It should be remembered that the melodic possibilities offered by a chiming watch are directly related to the number of gongs in its mechanism.

Two gongs, one high and one low, are a basic essential; however, watches with four gongs are also made today, though in the past more were sometimes used. More gongs means more notes and more possible melodic combinations. For instance, with four gongs, one can recreate the famed Westminster Chimes melody:

For the moment we’ll stick to the basic typology, the same that is normally on offer today and which you might have a chance of coming across and hearing in person if you are very lucky, as such watches are very rare items indeed!

Although there are variants developed by various makers, there are three basic forms to note first: the grande sonnerie, petite sonnerie and the minute repeater. When set to grande sonnerie mode of operation, the wristwatch willautomatically chime each quarter preceded by the hour automatically, in French called en passant or in passing, that is, without any further activation by the user. This is like a town clock or the long case clock in your grandfather’s house might function. When set to petite sonnerie mode of operation, the wristwatch will automatically chime the quarter, the half hour and the three-quarter-hour automatically without any further activation. The difference between these two modes is that in grande sonnerie mode, the hour is also chimed, whereas the petite sonnerie only chimes the quarters of the hour. In the minute repeater mode of operation, the watch only chimes ‘on demand,’ that is to say, it allows the user to call upon the watch to signal the time when desired, in principle as often as one wishes. By depressing a special pusher at the side of the

ON THE WRIST

Normally speaking, depressing the pusher not only releases the mechanism; it also winds the barrel a little each time to prevent the watch from requiring con- stant rewinding.

In the musical examples below, which apply to all the sounding functions described above, the pitches used are only relative. The low note represents the sound of the low gong and the high note the sound of the higher-pitched gong. Here are some examples of what you might hear at different times of day when you actuate the chiming functions:

The lower gong will always sound the hours first. Here the example shows 7:00

For each quarter that has passed both gongs are used. First the hours chime, as shown above, with a short space followed by two notes, one high and one low for each quarter (7:30)

The higher pitched gong sounds the minutes. It is always the last to chime. Here for instance the example shows 7:07

Working all together- hours, quarters and minutes would play a series chimes like this for 7:33

To produce the necessary tones for the hours, quarters and minutes as shown in the musical examples above, one must of course have small gongs and hammers for sound production. These gongs are much smaller than the bowl shaped bells normally used for clocks. Breguet is often credited with having invented and implemented them for watches. The gongs themselves are composed of special steel alloys chosen to produce a pure and clear sound and have a diameter somewhat smaller than the thickness of a string from the highest notes of a piano. The laws of physics dictate that, just like tubular bells, xylophones or wind chimes, the deeper pitched gong must be longer than the higher pitched gongs. And if they can be made larger, then they will also theoretically produce more volume.

The materials used for the movement itself and the surrounding case, the various thicknesses of all the components, the fastening of the gongs to the movement baseplate and even the sapphire glass over the movement will all have an effect on the sound color and volume of these small gongs. All these issues have been studied by Patek Philippe’s Advanced Research in the creation of their new (and quite loud!) 5750 Minute Repeater presented in December this 2021, thus showing that even this rare, esoteric and ancient type of watch mechanism can still be steadily improved upon.

The gongs themselves form only a part of the equation. The hammers that set the gongs in vibration must strike the gongs in exactly the same fashion as a piano string is struck, that is, the ham- mers must be controlled by some kind of releasing mechanism. In both the piano and the watch, the hammer must hit the particular gong after receiving an impulse, and afterwards with lightning speed fall back into a position of rest. If it doesn’t, the gongs would give nothing more than a deadened plunking sound like a drumstick hitting a drum but not being lifted up immediately afterwards. 

In the repeater this return is accomplished through the use of so-called banking springs and screws, which gen- tly see to it that the hammers are swiftly returned to their start position in order to await the following actuation from the movement. Some brands have been able to increase volume appreciably by paying great attention to these micro-moments in the attack and release of the hammer, which follow the exact same dynamics of sound production as the attack and release mechanism behind the hammers found in any acoustic piano. 

A few watch companies have invested considerable amounts of time and money researching these topics, often with only limited results. The problem is, as mentioned above, that while mechanical aspects can be met with the help and support of software development, there exist many subtle issues regarding sound that often prove less tangible and more elusive to solve. Often enough, similar to the situation surrounding old violins, old chiming watches seem to possess a sonority and volume that few modern pieces can equal. Metallurgical methods have changed through the centuries, certain techniques have been lost and some secrets will likely never be recovered. 

If you talk to the ‘old hands’ that have worked with these kinds of pchiming timepieces for decades, one of them will tell you: “Only gold cases give the best results, never use platinum, it is too hard.” Talk to another one and he’ll say: “White gold is the best.” Only the hands-on experience of watchmakers involved with these pieces on a daily basis through the course of many years can provide the necessary insight, and what works for one maker might not necessarily work for the other. It is just like attempting a comparison between a Stradivarius and a Guarneri violin, and trying to decide which is the better - each horological artist will have an opinion and method of working that achieves specific results. Aspects of tone are what in the end make chiming watches possibly the most personal kind of timepiece - from the maker’s viewpoint as well as for the person who is lucky enough to wear and own one.