Kal’tsit’s token: A peculiar pocket watch, never seen in the countries before, with four years and dates engraved on it, as well as a few letters in a crooked way.
A reference to Patek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication, ‘the world’s most complicated timepiece’. It is worth over USD $24 million in 2014.
The Patek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication (no. 198.385) is one of the most complicated mechanical pocket watches ever created. The 18-karat gold watch has 24 complications (functions) and was assembled by Patek Philippe. It was named after banker Henry Graves Jr who supposedly commissioned it out of his desire to outdo the Grande Complication pocketwatch of American automaker James Ward Packard. The two were both at the top of the watch collecting world, regularly commissioning innovative new timepieces. Henry Graves spent 60,000 Swiss francs (US$15,000) when he commissioned it in 1925. Adjusting for inflation, the sum is roughly equivalent to $219,000 in 2019.
It took three years to design, and another five years to manufacture the watch, which was delivered to Henry Graves on January 19, 1933. The Supercomplication was the world’s most complicated mechanical timepiece for more than 50 years, with a total of 24 different functions. These included Westminster chimes, a perpetual calendar, sunrise and sunset times, and a celestial map of New York as seen from the Graves’s apartment at 834 Fifth Avenue. The record was bested in 1989 when Patek Philippe released the Patek Philippe Calibre 89, but the Supercomplication remains the most complicated mechanical watch built without the assistance of computers.
The timepiece contains 920 individual parts, with 430 screws, 110 wheels, 120 removable parts, and 70 jewels, all of them handcrafted on a tiny scale. The timepiece is a gold, double-dialled and double-openfaced, minute repeating clockwatch with Westminster chimes, grande and petite sonnerie, split seconds chronograph, registers for 60-minutes and 12-hours, perpetual calendar accurate to the year 2100, moon-phases, equation of time, dual power reserve for striking and going trains, mean and sidereal time, central alarm, indications for times of sunrise/sunset and a celestial chart for the night time sky of New York City at 40 degrees 41.0 minutes North latitude.
