What we fundamentally want from a wristwatch is, of course, for it to tell us the time reliably and accurately every time we look at it. In other words, the hands should move across the dial with absolute precision for at least a few weeks. However, the early masters of the art of watchmaking were faced with the problem that the weight of all the moving parts themselves impaired the accuracy of the watch. Due to gravity, the accuracy of watches is not the same in all positions (e.g. in waves on a ship). Abraham Louis Breguet invented the tourbillon in 1795 to eliminate such changes in position and the resulting inaccurate rate of a watch. The name can be translated as ‘whirlwind’, and this is exactly the charming sight of this rapidly oscillating tourbillon, which is often embedded in a peep window in the dial or on the glass back of a caliber.
