While ‘modern pocket watch’ may seem somewhat oxymoronic in terminology terms, a particularly prized example of just such a haute horological highlight – a George Daniels Grand Complication pocket watch – stunned industry insiders recently when it sold for a staggering US$2.4 million, an all-time high among the specially-sourced lots going under the gavel in Geneva this season.
While many may not be familiar with the name ‘George Daniels’, he is an English horologist of a 1926-2011 vintage and oft considered one of the greatest watchmakers of his generation. His chief claim to fame lies in his invention of the co-axial escapement, a monumentally innovative mechanism that continually keeps precise time without the watch’s movement requiring any conducive lubrication.
This particular pocket watch, created at the height of the ’70s Quartz Crisis, features that very mechanism, as well as Daniels’ first-ever instantaneous perpetual calendar, a retrograde date, a minute repeater, a thermometer, an equation of time and a power reserve indicator.
Obviously only too aware of its value, Alexandre Ghotbi, head of sales for Phillips Geneva, described this unique statement timepiece as “the greatest horological invention of the last 200 years.” And he should know.