Swiss luxury watch brand Ulysse Nardin celebrates 180 years of its foundation and 25 years of the brand’s most iconic timepiece Freak, with the launch of the Super Freak, the brand’s as well as the world’s most complicated time-only watch ever created.
The Freak has been gratuitously but captivatingly complex since its debut in 2001 and has had many iterations over the intervening quarter century, so what makes this new model so Super?
If you first need to simply grasp what you’re looking at here: the hours are indicated by the larger arrow, while the minutes are shown by the arrow at the tip of that central structure of tangled gears (which itself rotates). It’s a traditional analog time display. But almost nothing is traditional about how it’s achieved. The Freak originally aimed to challenge basic principles of horology, and its creative but funky solutions have been evolving ever since. For its 25th anniversary, Ulysse Nardin doubled down on nearly every feature that made the model impressive to begin with.
We’ll cut to the chase: yes, two inclined flying tourbillons certainly contribute considerable complexity, but there’s plenty more to note about this technical beast. No fewer than 511 components come together only to display hours, minutes, and seconds— the latter for the first time in a Freak watch. Dazzling even in its most basic form, there are multiple patents and plenty of fascinating engineering behind the Freak, and several new ones introduced in the Super.
With so much going on in a watch like this, a deep dive will have to wait for now. Some key points of interest, however, include what Ulysse Nardin says are the world’s smallest differential and gimbal system: 5mm and 4.8mm, respectively. Go ahead and check your nearest differential— this one’s probably smaller. What exactly does this mean for the non-microengineer?
The differential averages out rate differences between the two balance wheels (here, both operating at 2.5Hz). The differential and seconds display are on a “decentered axis,” so the gimbal achieves the necessary pivot in transmitting energy to them. And this is all produced at an apparently unprecedentedly tiny scale.
More superlatives: it includes previous innovations such as Ulysse Nardin’ Grinder, “the industry’s most efficient and advanced” winding system ever. Everything going on here requires a lot of power, after all, but the movement lasts up to 72 hours in full wind. If all this technical cleverness weren’t enough by itself, more than 70% of components are hand finished. Being a visual centerpiece, the titanium tourbillons are of course among them.
Many of the Super Freak’s features build upon past developments. Released in 2022, for example, the Freak S was at the time also touted as the most complicated time-only watch ever. It involved two inclined balance wheels. Such components being at different angles from everything else just adds to the engineering challenge, but exponentially so when they’re tourbillons.
In a sense, the Freak itself has always been kind of like a tourbillon, which places an escapement in a rotating cage. It’s fundamentally different, though, as the entire movement itself moves to display the time: the barrel, fashioned with an arrow, rotates to show the hours; meanwhile, the “minute bridge” itself rotates to display the minutes with an arrow at its tip. The tourbillon was originally developed to improve timekeeping by evening out the effects of gravity. The purpose behind the Freak, on the other hand, was experimentation and spectacle.
Of course, the Freak’s most consequential role was pioneering the use of silicon in watchmaking, even though it didn’t strictly need to look crazy to do so. Silicon was revolutionary and controversial at the time, so the form of the watch that introduced it was also meant to represent a rethinking of horological principles— and to grab attention. In that sense, it’s reminiscent of the concept behind the Hamilton Ventura’s offbeat design when it introduced electric wristwatches way back in 1957.
There are, of course, multiple components made of silicon here including hairsprings, balance wheels as well as escapements of DIAMonSIL— silicon with a diamond coating, patented by Ulysse Nardin. As cringe as the word “innovation” is, it probably gets a pass in the context of speaking about something like this. All this freakiness fits into a 44mm-wide (16.54mm-thick, 30m-water-resistant) white gold case for a price of $361,600 and only 50 examples will be made.
This article first published in WatchTime.com
Images: Courtesy brand
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