The PHILLIPS New York Watch Auction: X, takes place on June 8 and 9, 2024, at our Park Avenue headquarters. The auction includes more than 150 of the world's finest watches – and though we are loath to boast, we truly think it's one of the best catalogs we've ever put together. We'll be highlighting a number of the most interesting lots and stories featured in the sale right here, including the three timepieces with Guillaume balances featured below.
– By Logan Baker
Only one Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to an individual directly associated with watchmaking: Charles Édouard Guillaume, who was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work discovering how anomalies in nickel-iron alloys could enable more precise measurement instruments.
The three alloys discovered by Guillaume – invar, elinvar, and platinite – found a variety of applications, including thermostats, but the most relevant for our purposes is the so-called Guillaume balance, arguably one of the most important horological developments of the early 20th century.
Charles-Édouard Guillaume was born in Val-de-Travers, Switzerland, on February 15, 1861. His father was a watchmaker. and Guillaume maintained close ties to the Swiss watch industry throughout his life. Guillaume spent 53 years working for the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, where in the late 1890s he first observed the unique properties of invar, elinvar, and platinite.
Temperature is a natural foe to physical measurement. Sudden temperature changes cause most materials to expand or contract, impacting precision. But Invar offered a near zero coefficient of thermal expansion, and elinvar had almost no elasticity ratio, which meant any object would experience only microscopic change in size from heat and cold.
Remembering his father's work as a watchmaker, Guillaume developed a compensated invar rod pendulum which set him on the road to the first compensating spring made of an iron-nickel alloy with 28 percent nickel (a Paul Perret spring).
After publishing the inaugural results on his work with invar, a watchmaker named Paul Perret contacted Guillaume to ask for an invar sample. Assisted by the engineer Marc Thury (who is said to have suggested the name "invar"), Perret discovered that invar had a coefficient of thermal expansion that was near zero.
In 1899, Guillaume identified that his nickel-iron alloy experiments could solve the horological problem known as watchmaking's "Secondary Error."
A material's temperature coefficient identifies the daily error range caused by an increase or decrease in the material's surrounding temperature. A coefficient of 0.1, for instance, indicates a gain of 0.1 seconds for every single degree rise in temperature per day.
The Secondary Error in watchmaking is determined by observing a timepiece's precision in at a pair of high and low temperatures, so that the fluctuations in isochronism, due to the temperature coefficiency of the watch’s components, can be noted and compared to reveal the anticipated effects of temperature variation on timekeeping. The timepiece's precision is then tested one final time at the average temperature between the high and low temperatures; the difference between the real value and the expected value is your Secondary Error, expressed as a gain or a loss.
Guillaume realized his nickel-iron alloys could effectively solve the problem of the Secondary Error due to their remarkable temperature coefficient.
After developing a slight variation of the invar alloy with a negative quadratic coefficient of expansion, he contacted a pair of external watchmakers to test his theory: Paul-D. Nardin, in Le Locle, and Paul Ditisheim, in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Their tests quickly proved Guillaume's theory as correct – the secondary error had been completely eliminated in timepieces with nick-iron balances. The first official results were then presented at the Neuchâtel Observatory in front of the legendary Adolphe Hirsch.
Then, in 1912, Guillaume had another thought: What if his nickel-iron alloy was combined with a metal such as manganese or chromium. His hypothesis being that this would allow for total compensation of the regulating organ, resulting in the construction of his monometallic balance using the new alloy of elinvar (invariable elasticity).
Zenith was the first watchmaker to utilize the elinvar spring, inside a chronograph produced in 1916. And four years later, Guillaume's discovery and application of invar and elinvar would be honored with recognition from the Swiss Academy of Sciences, in addition to the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics.
With invar and elinvar, Charles-Édouard Guillaume brought major progress to horology: thanks to the Guillaume balance, the rate discrepancies of marine and on-board chronometers are reduced to one tenth of a second. The invar pendulum that controls the beatings of astronomical clocks provides an accuracy in the order of one hundredth of a second.
Guillaume balances can mostly be found in Observatory competition-grade pocket watch movements produced in the early 20th century. Patek Philippe, Ulysse Nardin, Zenith, and numerous other makers adopted their application for use in their most precise timekeeping instruments.
Three remarkable timepieces available in the upcoming Phillips New York Watch Auction: X contain a Guillaume balance: lot 26, a 1912 Patek Philippe pocket watch with an "Extra"-grade movement that was awarded "Honourable Mention" at the 1915-1916 edition of the Geneva Astronomical Observatory Timing Contest; lot 28, a 1913 Patek Philippe pocket watch with an "Extra Special"-grade movement, originally made for Henry Graves Jr.; and lot 29, a truly incredible, oversized 1915 Ulysse Nardin split-seconds chronograph wristwatch.
You might also recall that the 2022 Zenith × Kari Voutilainen × Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo Calibre 135 Observatoire Limited Edition wristwatch featured a vintage Zenith Observatory-grade movement fitted with a Guillaume balance, as well.
You can view the complete catalog for the Phillips New York Watch Auction: X right here.