“I don’t know what you’d say it is that we’re doing, but it isn’t really watchmaking,” says Guy Semon, admiring a multi-million dollar scanning electron microscope recently installed in his research facility at TAG Heuer’s Swiss headquarters.
Down a hallway, an entire room has just been readied to receive a much larger transmission electron microscope – the kind of machine that can see individual atoms. The fast-expanding facility, where every whiteboard, window and compatible surface seems scrawled upon with equations, goes under the grand title of the TAG Heuer Institute. Semon, its founder, is nevertheless low-key in his description of his latest activities there. “It’s a combination of mathematics and cooking,” he shrugs.
The former naval pilot and aeronautical engineer, 57, has been cooking up remarkable horological advancements at TAG Heuer for some years. His successes include a series of super-watches using new technologies to push ever higher oscillating frequencies – and therefore timing precision – in chronographs (up to 5/10,000ths of a second in 2012’s Mikrogirder); the development of the firm’s Connected Watch, the most significant Swiss entry into the smartwatch market thus far; and the creation of a tourbillon watch selling for under £10,000 (most tourbillons go for five times that at least).
However, his latest project is focused on a single, tiny component: the hairspring – the critical spiral at the heart of a watch, whose concentric oscillations control, via the balance wheel it’s connected to, the regulation of energy through the movement.
The hairspring is a famously tricky element: made from arcane alloys, it’s susceptible to shocks and magnetism, and manufacturing deviations of much less than a micron can lead to hundreds of seconds a day in timekeeping error. So hard are hairsprings to produce, in fact, that while Rolex makes its own, one company, Nivarox – owned by Swatch Group – supplies almost all the hairsprings used in Switzerland.
Semon’s mathematical and, well, culinary method is taking things in an entirely new and unexpected direction. Building on a process first developed at the University of Utah, Semon and his team have invented a way to ‘grow’ carbon composite hairsprings in the lab. A method of Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) sees the spirals, consisting of carbon nanotubes infiltrated with amorphous carbon, formed in a pair of chemical reactors sitting in a closed-off room at the heart of the Institute.
The process involves six-inch wafers of silicon that are coated with iron atoms to the precise geometry of the hairsprings, which are then treated at high temperature amid a mixture of ethylene and hydrogen, exciting the carbon atoms and causing the nanotubes to grow. Viewed under an electron microscope, these structures resemble an extraordinary forest blowing gracefully in an atomic breeze. The journey from prepared wafer to 300 finished hairsprings, each one uniform and perfectly formed, takes just four hours.
The initiative is all the more surprising for the fact that it deviates from a previously held gospel in watchmaking: that if not in metal alloys, the future of hairsprings was in silicon. The material, valued for its anti-magnetic, friction-free properties, and the fact that it can be manufactured uniformly at volume by an ion-etching process, has been adopted by Patek Philippe, Omega, Ulysse Nardin and Breguet among others. Even Rolex, which in the early 2000s entered into a partnership with Patek and Swatch Group to investigate silicon technology, has tentatively introduced it for a single movement.
Semon and his Institute, in any event, have already dealt with silicon: in 2017, a watch named the Defy Lab was unveiled by fellow LVMH marque Zenith with a movement doing away entirely with the hairspring, balance and associated parts, replacing them with a single, geometrically complex piece of flexing, vibrating silicon. A total reimagining of watchmaking’s rules, the Defy Lab remained a curio, with only 10 prototypes made, until Baselworld this year in March where the production version, the Zenith Defy Inventor was unveiled. Semon says it is just the beginning of a project delving deeper into compliant mechanisms, running alongside projects on advanced alloys and nano tech.
The implications for the nano hairsprings are much more direct, and potentially seismic. For starters, Semon’s two reactors alone could soon grow all the hairsprings TAG Heuer needs, eliminating reliance on suppliers. TAG could also itself become a supplier: part of the process has been the design of a software tool into which data can be input for factors such as space available for the hairspring, or oscillating frequency required. The shape and geometry of the required spring can then be calculated and produced – for any watch.
Moreover, Semon believes his hairsprings deliver significant improvements on both silicon and alloy versions. “Silicon is very fragile, expensive to produce and limited in terms of shape optimisation. What we have is better for shock resistance, it’s anti-magnetic, it’s thermally balanced, and it’s easy to assemble for the watchmaker.”
Semon is determined that, while already game-changing, his nano tech will keep delivering increasing performance benefits in years to come, as research continues. Perhaps most significant, however, is that whereas watchmaking frequently benefits from advances made in more high-tech areas of science and engineering (ion-etched silicon being an example), this time the situation is reversed. The process Semon and his team have developed and patented has implications far beyond watchmaking, should LVMH seek to pursue them.
“It’s the first time in the world we have a 3D structure as a mechanical component manufactured with nanotubes,” Semon says. “You can find around the world many, many laboratories working on nanotubes, but they’re focusing at the atomic scale – that’s where the properties of nanotubes are very impressive. This is the first time we keep atomic properties at the microscopic scale. It’s not nothing. It’s a big, big step.”
Semon reels off examples like space science, biomedical applications, electronic sensors, gas detectors and electric batteries as a few areas where this could be deployed in the future. For now, though, Semon’s attention is thoroughly occupied by watches, and the myriad avenues he feels he has yet to pursue.
“Less than 10 per cent of what we can invent in watches has been invented already,” he says. “When I look at a watch, I don’t see a watch, I see physics. The field is enormous, because you are mixing time and energy. That’s what a watch is, and those are two big dimensions – we have decades ahead of us.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
