Explainer / What is a minute repeater? The ‘Everest’ of watch complications makes the humble tourbillon look like mere Matterhorn

Apr 13 , 2022

Minute Repeater Tri-Axial Tourbillon by Girard Perregaux, which is equipped with a gong to sound delightful chimes and features two concave box-type sapphire crystals to showcase the 37.50 mm-diameter movement, reference GP09560-0001. Photo: Handout

Are minute repeaters the most complicated timepiece complication? Invented to chime the time at the push of a button, a typical Patek Phillipe mechanism today takes some 300 hours to make

Former LVMH head and industry giant Jean-Claude Biver famously contrasted the tourbillon and minute repeater as like ‘climbing the Matterhorn and climbing Mount Everest’

In the watch world, where technical expertise reigns supreme, there is one complication that represents the pinnacle of both watch collecting and watchmaking savoir faire: the minute repeater. At the push of a button, it will chime out the hours, quarter hours and minutes in a series of high-pitched notes, each generated by a tiny hammer and gong housed within a case no wider than a human wrist.

The minute repeater is widely accepted as the most elaborate complication in watchmaking. Former LVMH watchmaking president and a giant of the field, Jean-Claude Biver, once famously compared the difference between making a tourbillon and a minute repeater, saying that “it is the difference between climbing the Matterhorn and climbing Mount Everest”. Given that a tourbillon is already a complex and well-respected complication, you can imagine the amount of technical know-how needed to create a minute repeater.

Are minute repeaters the most complicated timepiece complication? Photo: Jaeger-LeCoultre

Even the simplest of minute repeaters needs an astonishing number of different mechanisms, including the all-important chiming hammers and gongs, the governing mechanism to prevent all the chimes from striking at once, the surprise piece to prevent the levers from slipping backwards onto the wrong step, and the all-or-nothing piece, which blocks the minute repeater mechanism until and unless the activating lever has been pulled back the entire way, thus preventing half-activated or incorrect chiming.

The system is so complicated that it requires an immense number of components – over 100 for a Patek Philippe, for instance – each of which has to be manufactured to extremely tight tolerances. And because each component has to work in harmony with the others to ensure that the chimes sound as intended – at just the right speed, tempo and pitch – it is imperative that each minute repeater be assembled and adjusted by hand by a master watchmaker. There are no short cuts.

Brands continue to push still further though. Van Cleef & Arpels’ Poetic Complications, created in 2006, is just one example of this, raising the stakes with a five-minute repeater mechanism, so that besides striking the hours, it also chimes the number of five-minute periods since the hour.

Van Cleef & Arpels and Poetic Complications watches. Photo: SCMP

According to Patek Philippe – regarded as the grandmaster of chiming watches – assembling a minute repeater mechanism takes 200 to 300 hours of work, work that rests on decades of exacting experience. Its 5303R-001 Minute Repeater Tourbillon displays all of the intensity of that dedication. The rose gold watch has been stripped back to only a minimal dial – just the hands and minute track – in order to lay bare the full splendour of the chiming gongs.