Time Jumper

Description

Concept & Creative Context

The Time Jumper marks a decade since the revival of Czapek & Cie, and it celebrates this milestone in the most Czapek way possible: by going against the expected. Rather than unveiling an elaborate grand complication, the Maison chose to reimagine the most fundamental act in watchmaking — the expression of time itself.

The creative impulse draws a direct line between past and future. François Czapek, the great 19th-century Genevan watchmaker, was a master of the pocket watch: the half-hunter case, the round form, the art of guillochage. The Time Jumper reclaims all three, then projects them into a retro-futuristic vision shaped by science fiction, spatial exploration, and Czapek's signature philosophy: head in the sky, feet on the ground.

The result is a 40.5mm "flying saucer" in stainless steel with a white gold guilloché inlay — smooth, aerodynamic, almost without a straight line. Designed by Thomas Funder in close collaboration with the Maison, the case plays on the tension between symmetry and asymmetry, beauty and strangeness that has always defined Czapek's aesthetic. The half-hunter cover is engraved with an entirely new three-dimensional guilloché motif — an exclusive registered pattern created by Czapek's longstanding partner Metalem, evolved from the Singularité guilloché of the Antarctique Tourbillon. It creates a striking optical illusion: curves spiralling into a deep black hole, its event horizon formed by a bubble-shaped loupe positioned directly above the dial crystal. Through this loupe, the hours spring into view. Open the cover, and the entire open-worked movement is revealed beneath a sapphire glass.

Technical Characteristics

At the heart of the Time Jumper beats Calibre 10.01, the first expression of Czapek's new in-house Calibre 10 platform — a self-winding movement designed not as an endpoint but as a foundation for the next decade of complications, each of which will be fully integrated rather than modularly stacked.

The complication is a jumping hour displayed on a 24-hour register across two sapphire discs (one for units, one for tens), accompanied by trailing minutes on a rotating peripheral ring. Displaying 24 hours on two independent discs simultaneously is a première, protected by a patent-pending mechanism. The 24-hour register was chosen deliberately: the flying saucer form evokes an astronaut's instrument, for which a 24-hour display is natural.

The centrally mounted winding rotor in recycled 950 platinum is skeletonised to reveal the architecture beneath. Its arms echo the shape of a geometry compass, attached to the central axis with geometric precision. The five-spoke wheels, diamond-bevelled, are an exclusive Czapek signature. Rhodium-coated bridges contrast with blackened plates to create a play of light evoking the depths of space. Hours are filled with Super-Luminova; the minutes disc is laser-coloured in blue. The movement was designed, conceived and assembled in-house, with 75% of its components machined internally.

The piece is issued as a limited edition of 100 in stainless steel, part of an overall production of 180 Calibre 10.1 movements — a figure chosen to honour the 180th anniversary of the founding of Czapek & Cie in Geneva in 1845.

Supplied by the brand to the GPHG for its entry.