Patek Philippe is a Swiss watch company founded in 1839 by Antoni Patek and his compatriot Francois Czapek who later left the partnership in 1845. By the year 1851, Antoine Patek partnered with Jean Adrien Philippe which the name Patek Philippe was launched. In the beginning, the Swiss company produced timepieces that were a marvel of precision look, design, and engineering. They were able to have an output of 15,000 per year without compromising the quality of their watches’ performance and functionalities. However, the company gained to be one of the top watches in the market at the end of the 19th century.
For many years, the Swiss company is always able to introduce new technology in the watchmaking industry. The famous stem-winding and the hand setting mechanism that are still used today were all the inventions of Jean Adrien Philippe. Moreover, Patek Philippe has 70 patents and continually leading the way in launching new technologies for watchmaking. In 2006, the first wheel in the world that is silicon made for anchor escapement was introduced.
There are things that only Patek Philippe could produce in their watches that no one else could. Also, the Swiss company is known to be the second most complex movement that has ever produced. An American financier, Henry Graves, commissioned the Graves Supercomplication in 1933 that displays the New York City’s night sky, sunrise and sunset’s measurement and time’s equation which differentiates the 24-hour clock or the Mean Time, and sundial time.
In commemoration of Patek Philippe’s 150th anniversary, the Calibre 89 was introduced in the year 1989. It is the most complex movement that Patek Philippe has made. The Caliber 89 has 33 complications with an inclusion of the Date of Easter through 2017, a start chart that shows a graphical representation of the night sky, a split-second chronograph for the elapse time measurement and a Grand Sonnerie that has four gongs that chime the time in hours, quarter and half hour.
It takes up to four years of research and development in processing the creation of a Patek timepiece. It takes nine months as a minimum in the production, and it takes two more years for more complicated watches. Furthermore, it takes six weeks to three months for the Swiss company to do the testing of each model before setting its availability for selling. Besides, timepieces from Patek Philippe are not for mass production, and each one of them is unique. Hence, Patek Philippe only makes sublime timepieces using the best materials, advanced technology and complicated movements.