20 October

The day in brief

Phillips and The Hour Glass will bring together 22 George Daniels watches in Singapore, including the two Space Travellers, shown side by side for the first time. The George Daniels 100 exhibition marks the centenary of the British watchmaker and takes place during IAMWATCH, from 12 to 15 November.

In New York, WatchTime New York closed its 11th edition with a record 3,000 visitors. In Basel, the new Basilia fair already has registrations equivalent to 70% of its target exhibitors for April 2027.

Among the launches, H. Moser & Cie. presents a skeletonised tourbillon Pioneer created with the player Saquon Barkley, and Armin Strom gives the Mirrored Force Resonance Zeitgeist 1665 a movement in a yellow gold tone.

Phillips brings together 22 George Daniels watches for the centenary of his birth

Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo and The Hour Glass announced on 19 October the exhibition George Daniels 100 – The Genesis of Artisanal Watchmaking. It brings together 22 watches by George Daniels (1926–2011), the greater part of everything the British watchmaker completed, and will be on show at IAMWATCH 2026, the independent watchmaking gathering held from 12 to 15 November at The Singapore EDITION hotel in Singapore. The public days are 13, 14 and 15 November.

According to the organisers, these 22 watches had not been brought together for almost two decades. The centrepiece is the meeting of the two Space Travellers, from 1982, which had never been shown side by side. Daniels sold the first shortly after finishing it, regretted it, and used the second to take the idea further: he added a chronograph able to measure both mean solar time and sidereal time. The Space Traveller II was his personal watch until his death in 2011.

The difference between the two scales is small but constant. The sidereal day, measured by the Earth's rotation relative to the stars, lasts about 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds, almost four minutes less than the 24-hour mean solar day shown by civil timekeeping. In a watch that displays both, the sidereal indication must advance slightly faster than the solar one, through a gear ratio calculated for that purpose.

Daniels made 24 pocket watches and two wristwatches, the Four-Minute Tourbillon and the Spring Case Tourbillon, before continuing the Millennium and Anniversary series with his apprentice, Roger W. Smith. According to Phillips, each watch required more than 2,500 hours of work, and Daniels mastered 32 of the 34 disciplines needed to make a watch by hand. His book Watchmaking remains a reference work on watchmakers' benches.

His best-known invention is the co-axial escapement, adopted by Omega. In the Swiss lever escapement, impulse passes from the escape wheel to the lever by sliding between the teeth and the pallets. In the co-axial escapement, most of the impulse is delivered by an almost direct push, with far less sliding. With less friction, the escapement depends less on lubrication and keeps its precision for longer, which was precisely Daniels' aim.

The exhibition includes the avant-première of a Phillips documentary on Daniels' influence on independent watchmaking, filmed on the Isle of Man, in England and in Switzerland, with interviews and archive footage from The George Daniels Educational Trust. The screening is scheduled for 14 November. After Singapore, the exhibition moves to Phillips in London in early 2027.

Find out more on the auction house's website.

WatchTime New York closes its 11th edition with 3,000 visitors

The show organised by WatchTime magazine ended on 18 October with a record 3,000 visitors over three days at Gotham Hall in Manhattan. It was the 11th edition and the largest to date, with 48 exhibiting brands, nine of them first-timers: Jacob & Co., Kollokium, Kudoke, Gérald Genta, Daniel Roth, Singer, Ferdinand Berthoud, Schwarz Etienne and Keris.

The opening night, on 16 October, sold out and drew 625 guests, also a record. The programme included talks on collecting; in one of them, the actor Ryan Reynolds spoke with Maximilian Büsser, founder of MB&F.

WatchTime New York is the centrepiece of New York Watch Week. As the Radar reported on 16 October, the city hosted three watch shows on the same weekend.

Find out more on the organiser's website.

Basilia already has 70% of its target exhibitors for its first edition

The Basilia Jewellery & Watch Fair, the new jewellery and watch trade fair created by MCH Group and Informa Markets, has already received registrations equivalent to 70% of its target exhibitors. The first edition takes place from 8 to 11 April 2027 in Basel, and the organisers expect more than 400 exhibitors.

According to figures released on 19 October, about 75% of registered exhibitors come from jewellery and gemstones and the rest from watchmaking; 65% are from Asia and 35% from Europe. The fair will have an Emerging Brands District for independent watch brands, with launch stages and press support, and more than 2,500 hotel rooms reserved in partnership with Basel's tourism office.

The return of an international fair to Basel carries symbolic weight: MCH Group organised Baselworld, which ceased to be held after 2019. Basilia presents itself as a bridge between the Asian and European markets and covers the high-end, mid-range and accessible segments.

Find out more on the organiser's website.

H. Moser & Cie. creates a skeletonised tourbillon Pioneer with Saquon Barkley

On 19 October H. Moser & Cie. presented the Pioneer Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Aventurine Saquon Barkley, a limited series of 97 pieces developed with the American football player. The number of pieces corresponds to Barkley's year of birth, 1997.

The steel case measures 42.8 mm in diameter and is water-resistant to 120 metres. The dial is fully skeletonised and reveals the movement, with a small aventurine dial for the hours and minutes. All the indices carry Super-LumiNova, but the 2 and the 6 glow in a different colour, a reference to the number 26 that Barkley wears on the field.

The HMC 811 calibre, a self-winding in-house movement, has a one-minute flying tourbillon at 6 o'clock and a power reserve of 74 hours. Its distinctive feature is the cylindrical hairspring, made by hand by Precision Engineering AG, a company in the same group as Moser. Unlike a flat hairspring, which develops in a single plane, a cylindrical hairspring is wound as a helix and has both ends curved inwards, like the terminal curve of a Breguet hairspring. This geometry allows the hairspring to expand and contract concentrically, without shifting its centre of gravity, which favours isochronism, that is, the ability to keep the same rate at different amplitudes.

The price is 79,000 Swiss francs, excluding VAT.

Find out more on the brand's website.

Armin Strom gives the Zeitgeist 1665 movement a yellow gold tone

Armin Strom has presented the Mirrored Force Resonance Zeitgeist 1665 3N, a limited series of 25 pieces that changes the movement finish of the model launched in 2025. The mainplate and bridges now have a 3N yellow gold tone, with a matt finish, hand-bevelled and polished edges, black-polished screws and surfaces decorated with perlage and circular graining.

The steel case measures 43 mm in diameter and 11.55 mm in height. The chapter ring, in polished black lacquer, sits above the movement, which is visible from the dial side, and indicates the hours, the off-centre minutes and the twin seconds. A pusher at 10 o'clock activates the flyback function, which returns both seconds hands to zero at the same time.

The ARF21-ZG calibre, a hand-wound in-house movement, has two independent regulating organs, each with its own balance beating at 3.5 Hz (25,200 vibrations per hour), and 80 hours of power reserve supplied by two barrels. The two balances are linked by a patented resonance clutch spring. When two nearby oscillators exchange energy through a link of this kind, they tend to synchronise in phase opposition, and the disturbances caused by shocks and wrist movements partly cancel each other out, which helps to stabilise the rate. According to the brand, the spring is designed to keep this synchronisation continuous and predictable on the wrist.

Find out more on the brand's website.

What deserves attention

The George Daniels centenary is one of the themes of the year. The reunion of the two Space Travellers gives IAMWATCH the weight of a museum exhibition and shows how independent watchmaking looks to its origins for the legitimacy that the market now grants it.

In New York and in Basel, the figures point in the same direction: the shows closest to collectors and independent brands are growing, while the trade fair calendar is being redrawn after the end of Baselworld. It remains to be seen whether Basilia will attract well-known watch brands or remain mainly a jewellery fair, as the current figures suggest.

Among the launches, Moser and Armin Strom build on known foundations, but the cylindrical hairspring and the resonance clutch remain rare solutions that deserve technical attention even in commemorative series.