Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume 2 of B.H. Magazine. Subscribe here.
It’s not often something as anachronistic as a mechanical watch sets a new Guinness World Record, but IWC Schaffhausen has done exactly that. With a moonphase mechanism that will be accurate for 45 million years, IWC’s Portugieser Eternal Calendar ref.IW505701 has taken haute horlogerie into another realm of time and space.
Alongside its groundbreaking moonphase complication – which required a supercomputer simulation to calculate 22 trillion combinations of wheels and teeth – the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar is also the brand’s first-ever secular perpetual calendar.
Only four other watchmakers have successfully produced a secular perpetual calendar, a complication that accounts for the three leap years that a regular perpetual calendar will miss every four centuries. IWC solved this kink in the calendar thanks to a wheel in the mechanism that only turns once every 400 years.
If the movement keeps ticking, the Eternal Calendar will remain accurate until the year 3999. And it only stops there because humanity hasn’t yet decided if the year 4000 will be a leap year. According to some napkin math, that’s roughly 75 generations from now.
“How great is this idea: to give something to the next generation, and to the next. I won’t give my cell phone or my computer to my children,” says Markus Bühler, IWC’s Associate Director of Watch and Movement Assembly. “That’s why a mechanical watch is absolutely brilliant. It’s relatively simple to maintain and almost lasts forever if you take care of it.”
As an heirloom piece, IWC’s Portugieser Eternal Calendar is arguably, unrivaled. Capable of telling you the time today, and your descendants the time for centuries to come.
