ABTW: How do you feel these quartz-driven pieces fit into the larger luxury watch market?

RH: I think a quartz timepiece has to do something really special to compete. Something that would always be impossible for pure mechanicals. In yachting you have two distinct, high-calibre genres. The sleek sailboat, echoing the history of the art, and the motor yacht, being racy, dashing and practical. Cohabiting with the pure mechanicals in your collection, we are the motor-yacht you can wear on your wrist.

ABTW: Do you forsee there being any mechanical movements entering the lineup?

RH: I have made pure mechanical movements – notably a very complicated clock you can see if you visit our workshops. I call them ‘pure mechanical’ because of course our timepieces are 50% mechanical – we have to drive pointers round using gear trains, too. It’s just that we pump them with silicon instead of a balance spring. I have to play to my strengths, and I do silicon well. Other watchmaking brands make pure mechanicals so well I would be a fool to try to compete.

ABTW: Can you elaborate on the TimeKiss functionality?

RH: TimeKiss has evolved from a frustration I have had during 20 years of working with electronics: How do you get lots of information in and out of a tiny device? To do the things we can do with our watches, you need occasionally to connect them to a bigger, cleverer thing with more of a user interface and connectivity. We’ve tried four routes – USB connector (not waterproof, but handy for recharge), 2-contact TimeKiss (waterproof but requiring non-standard accessories), optical (very elegant but slow), and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). BLE knocks the socks off the others, and we’re working with other movement makers to establish it as a standard.

ABTW: And now, onto the new project, the atomic watch: What brought you to the idea of incorporating the atomic clock module?

RH: There is a lot of historical background over hundreds of years which I probably should be telling you, but you probably know it already. So this is the story of how I stumbled my way through to the vision during the spring of 2013.

Our standard watch movements have thermal compensation, so in theory they should be accurate to somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds a year. The problem is calibration. The crystal has to be trimmed over its entire temperature range, which involves sticking them in freezers and ovens while monitoring them.

At the same time, they have to be measured against a very accurate time source. We use a GPS Disciplined Oscillator, but where we are it is very hard to get a GPS signal, being in the Wharf District of London. I happened to be going to Greenwich and decided to look in at the Observatory. There was a 1970’s rack-mounted atomic clock on display in the museum, and I wondered if I might be able to find one on eBay as a time source.

Back home, I found atomic clocks aren’t a hot eBay item, but I did come across Symmetricom’s Chip Scale Atomic Clock, a limited availability atomic physics module developed for the US Department of Defence for use in UAVs and cruise missiles. It was TINY! 4 cm by 3 cm by 1cm. (But still very expensive.) I asked if I could buy one, and to my surprise they said yes, although there are defense-related agreements I had to sign. So I had a nice piece of test equipment.

Then my thoughts went back to Greenwich, and seeing Harrison’s H4 marine chronometer. I realized I could put the physics unit inside a pocket watch smaller than the H4, and following his tradition, it would be the most accurate chronometer in the world. In our case, 1.5 seconds per 1000 years. The temptation to make the most accurate chronometer in existence was, of course, irresistible. The vision crystallized in a fraction of a second and I shouted out an expletive in excitement. Then I remembered I was in a restaurant, and now everybody was staring at me.

ABTW: What sort of hurdles have you had to overcome incorporating this module into a wrist-mounted watch case? Editor’s note: this was a typo we had in the interview question list, and Richard graciously rolled with our mistake!)

RH: It’s a biggish pocket watch. Give me five years and maybe you’ll have a wristwatch version. There have been two hurdles: electrical power and over-ambition.

Electrical power: The No.10 consumes 40mA on full steam, which could mean a daily overnight charge, plus exhaustion of the physics unit if a multi-decade life is required. So there is an Atomic Disciplined Crystal Oscillator mode that, for long journeys without charge, which allows the atomics to sleep most of the time and then wake up, work out how much the crystal has drifted, and then correct for it.

Over-ambition: One display alone has required 8th-degree tidal harmonics for over 3000 coastal stations around the world. I know this is what we’re good at, but even so, sometimes I worry we’ve over-stretching. I sold a lovely house in Paris and started renting in London to achieve this goal. I hope it’s worth it.

ABTW: Are there any plans to produce a further line after the 12-piece limited edition?

RH: I’ve no idea what we’ll do along these lines next. You have to remember that these atomic physics units are bits of military kit, and I’m not sure we’ll even be able to get any more. As it is, our contract says we have to be very careful who we sell them to. more »