Emc – Close-up on an extraordinary balance

Geneva - January 2014

After breaking the codes of conventional time displays, URWERK is bursting onto the subdued world of chronometry with a bang. Always true to itself, URWERK researches, questions, and innovates, even if it means upsetting the established status quo. And this project, long in the pipeline, has now culminated in the revolutionary EMC – Electro Mechanical Control. Here, EMC – the first mechanical watch that enables the timing to be both measured and adjusted by its owner – reveals some of the secrets of its creation.

Now over to its creators.

"With EMC, we have found a way to decrypt the language of a mechanical watch and make this language understandable to all. To do so, we have integrated a type of optical ‘Big Brother’ inside the watch. On demand and in real time, it monitors the balance frequency and converts this measurement into seconds gained or lost per day.

To achieve this, we had to reinvent the balance wheel to make it ‘readable’ for our optical sensor. We took advantage of this requirement to completely revisit this critical component. The balance wheel, unlike most watch components, has undergone amazing evolution through the ages, to arrive at three arms and timing adjustment screws. We focused our research on the aerodynamics of the balance to harness its full potential. We performed material, profiling and stability tests in order to achieve the optimum result: A linear balance, perfectly poised to minimize power loss."



Dominique – Head of the U-Research Division and engineer trained at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ)

"We conducted research for nearly three years to optimize the performance of our balance. We focused our work on factors such as fluid dynamics, turbulence and air resistance. All these disrupt the timing rate of a conventional balance wheel.

Balance wheel in ARCAP P40, linear balance coupled to the optical sensor

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Media contact:

Ms Yacine Sar