THE GOOD LIFE Watches


Day-Date and the 1908 dress watch. Its aura is further augmented by the bezel’s broader- than-normal fluting, crisp contrast finishes and an insistent dial pattern, featuring laser- engraved segments, which Rolex calls ‘honey- comb’ but to me resembles snakeskin scales. The Land-Dweller is a watch with ‘main


character energy’ – the specific main char- acter being Roger Federer, Rolex’s mega- ambassador, whose Instagram teased its launch with a blurry, rumour-baiting appear- ance days ahead of the official reveal. Leon- ardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise and British fast- fashion bigshot Umar Kamani were among the first wave of Land-Dweller owners. But this is not what actually makes the Land-Dweller a Land-Mark. It is also a true, dyed-in-the-wool, years-in-development tech- nical revelation – and one that really matters. A bit of background. If you fundamentally


want to change the game in watchmaking, it’s the escapement – the tick-tock, time reg-


ulation part of the movement, and also the chief source of inefficiencies and fragilities – where you need to do it. Very simply, as a watch beats away, interactions between the toothed ‘escape’ wheel and the lever that im- pulses it – how energy from the mainspring is regulated into steady beats for accurate timekeeping – generates significant friction. That makes its power usage inefficient and sometimes uneven, and means lubricants are needed; these eventually congeal and clog things up.


S


olving the escapement’s frailties – it also breaks easily and is particularly susceptible to magnetic interference –


has been watchmaking’s eternal quest. Abraham-Louis Breguet himself almost got there in 1789 with his ‘natural escapement’, a miraculous invention thwarted only by the manufacturing limitations of the age. The great British horologist, Dr George


Daniels, greatly improved on Breguet’s idea in the 1970s: his independent double-wheel escapement was precise, efficient and hugely elegant in its symmetry – it’s found in his pocket watch masterpieces but wasn’t suitable for scale production. Instead, he developed an alternative idea, the co-axial escapement, which he sold to Omega. It now powers every Omega wristwatch and was, up to 2025, the sole advancement in


SOLVING THE


ESCAPEMENT’S FRAILTIES HAS BEEN


WATCHMAKING’S ETERNAL QUEST


escapement design to have been industrial- ised since 1750. With the Land-Dweller, Rolex finally has its own novel, scalable and spectacularly clever mechanism. True to the brand’s grand tradition of extravagant portmanteau naming conventions, it has dubbed this the ‘Dynapulse’, and it is the product of technol- ogy at the bleeding edge. Its teeny parts are micro-fabricated in monocrystalline non- magnetic silicon to arcane geometries, us- ing photolithographic processes designed for semiconductor production. It’s stuffed with patents and ideas, and means the movement it drives, Calibre 7135, beats faster (ten oscillations per second instead of eight), and therefore more reliably and


Above and right: The Land-Dweller’s parts are micro- fabricated in


monocrystalline non-magnetic silicon


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