Does progress always go from simple to more complicated?
Not necessarily, according to one of the most talented watchmakers of our time, Vianney Halter. A year after the Deep Space Resonance model combining two balances with a triple-axis tourbillon, the watchmaker mesmerized by the phenomenon of resonance is releasing a three-hand model called La Resonance.
There are no longer any complications to distract from the stars of the show — two spiral-balance oscillators moving in sync, either in phase (the two springs are expanded together) or in phase opposition (one spiral is fully expanded while the other is fully contracted).
What Halter finds so appealing about studying this natural phenomenon is the mixture of laws with chaos, which is why he tried to convey this sense of strict rules meeting spontaneity in La Resonance.
He scrapped the mainplate completely in order to do so. There’s no common ground, just a floating assembly of enlarged wheels and symmetrical bridges. The two balances can be viewed through a lateral window made of sapphire crystal. It's built into the 39 mm case comprised of a unibody titanium ring complemented by three sapphire windows.
The use of titanium and the unconventional architecture have allowed the model's total weight without the strap to be kept to just 35 g. And that's despite the fact that the watch still has a minute scale with prominent markings.
The two balances are united by acoustic resonance. It took Halter seven years of research and development to apply this phenomenon in watchmaking. The manually wound movement developed by Halter ensures 100 hours of power delivered by its two balances. Their energy is fed through a differential in the center of the watch and split between the seconds wheels at one o'clock and five o'clock.
All the details are openworked, so the watch owner can appreciate the impressive finishing on components. Halter calculated that the accumulated length of surfaces beveled by hand equals 3.7 meters, i.e., the 11 wheels and 13 titanium bridges.
The 30 vertically positioned concave pillars connecting the components were polished by hand. Halter's three-hand La Resonance is so complicated that the watchmaker is only prepared to make seven pieces a year.