Audemars Piguet’s calibre 7138 perpetual calendar movement a ‘game changer’
Perpetual calendar watches are usually fiddly to adjust, needing a tool. New Audemars Piguet models are reset with turns of a single crown
Watch brands love an anniversary, big or small, and treat them as a way to showcase their technical skill. This year, Audemars Piguet celebrates its 150th, so it is no surprise its research and development teams worked for five years to create something they believe might change watchmaking for the next 150.
On February 17, AP showcased the fruits of that labour at the Arc, the watchmaker’s nearly 194,000 sq ft new manufacturing centre in Le Brassus, Switzerland.
The futuristic building, which is still only partially open, curves around the existing Manufacture des Forges and brings much of AP’s production across the Vallée de Joux under one roof. Here, chief executive Ilaria Resta and her team showed new watches and celebrated the brand’s history.
The star of the show was calibre 7138, the new perpetual calendar movement, called a quantième perpétuel, or QP, in French. Sebastian Vivas, the company’s heritage and museum director, said: “The QP is the game changer.”
A perpetual calendar is one of horology’s oldest and most esteemed complications. It will accurately show the day of the week, date, month, week number and moon phase, even across leap years – which it also indicates, usually on a small subdial with four segments.
Keep it wound, and it will be accurate until the year 2100 – when there’s a single-day deviation in the Gregorian calendar.