We want to tell you the news about HyT at SIHH 2016, but first we will take a leap in time. A few years ago, during the International Expo held in Switzerland in 2002, a visionary Lucien Vouillamoz (a nuclear physicist, among other disciplines) explained to his friends the idea of designing a wristwatch that would run on water!, something like a miniature hourglass. The lack of technical solutions at that time put the project on hold, but the process has begun. Several years later, Vouillamoz's idea has evolved from a “wrist water watch” to a fluid (actually two) within a closed circuit moved by two flexible reservoirs. The liquids cannot mix because their molecules repel each other like magnets with the same polarity, and they move through the circuit by alternately compressing the two tanks in a back-and-forth motion. What will be the H1 is beginning to be sketched.
Much time (and money) later, and after the founding of the companies HyT (watchmaker) and Preciflex (which supplies R&D to the previous one), the first one was built.
prototype composed of plexiglass and membranes activated by cams... which soon becomes obsolete thanks to the use of a borosilicate glass capillary with an inner diameter of 1mm and aerospace technology for the tanks, which have been converted into bellows. The Chronode company comes into play and finallyIn 2012 HyT is officially presented at Baselworld. Four years later, the forecasts they made in Basel have been fulfilled one after another (launch of the H1, H2, H3, H4...) and if there have been deviations they have been towards more: new models have appeared that they did not explain to us then and that probably not even they themselves knew about. From the models in collaboration with Alinghi to theSkullthat have brought them so much success.
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The fact is that they were presented for the first time at the 2016 SIHH with an extra twist. If the idea of marking time with liquids in a mechanical watch was already baroque in itself (bizarre, as they would say in English), Lucien Vuillamoz himself explained to us for the first time what they had come up with to illuminate it: a small dynamo that is charged with a mini-barrel that, when you press the button, releases the mini-mainspring and... provides light to two LEDs integrated into the six o'clock index, the same one that covers the entrance and exit of the capillary through which the clocks circulate. fluids to and from the bellows reservoirs. A prodigy of miniaturization. Watching it work is like attending those performances from the 19th century, when circuses brought unprecedented wonders. Also based on the H1, the white-blue version is presented under the name Iceberg2.
«We have always said that we would never make a classical piece. "So, of course, we made one." This is how Vincent Perriard, CEO of HyT, presents the H2 Tradition. The H2 is an evolution of the H1 whose main visual difference is that the bellows are no longer parallel to form a V, an idea proposed by Giulio Papi when he was commissioned to develop the series. But in this case they have gone further and wanted to give a classic look to a piece that is anything but classic. The changes have not only been aesthetic: the steering wheel had to be moved towards the center to make room for the seconds subdial, which has required revising the design and which has once again been taken over by “Dr. Papi's office” (that is, APRP or Audemars Piguet Renaud Papi). The set completes its “classicity” with guilloche plates, lacquered indexes and fire-blued hands. It seems to me that it even has some Steampunk in it.
All HyT pieces are series limited to a maximum of 50 copies, except for the H3 which is limited to 25... although its price of around €240,000 may have something to do with that.
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