Globetrotter Gold
Globetrotter Gold
- Limited edition
- 30 meters water resistance
- Alligator leather strap
- 45 mm case
A world of gold and light
Like a finely-crafted atlas, the Globetrotter Gold represents our Planet. The lands seen on the surface are sculpted to precision and together with the deep, hand-painted seas, they serve as a backdrop to the world time dual time zone display. Overhanging these is an infinite arch which fixes their rotation. In shades of blue, Arnold & Son pays a chromatic tribute to John Arnold's marine chronometers, which were embarked on English naval ships in the 18th century.
The Globetrotter Gold measures 45 mm in diameter. In its centre, the dome depicting the Northern Hemisphere is held from side to side by an immense openworked bridge carved in red gold. This arch is the visual signature of the Globetrotter, and houses in its centre a functional ruby holding the axis of universal time.
Refined in blue
With its Globetrotter Gold, Arnold & Son has chosen to refine the aesthetics of this major piece in a way which affirms its elegance and modernity. The appliqué indexes on two planes are faceted in red gold and painted in Super-LumiNova. The bottom part of the dial which surrounds the map of the world has a subtle sunlit finish in shades of blue, and the ring showing universal time is in transparent sapphire. Local times are therefore read by the red hands pointing to the gold indexes, while world times are identified by visualising an imaginary longitude from the ruby in the central bridge to the 24-hour sapphire ring.
Openworked, svelte design
The architecture of the Globetrotter Gold crossways bridge is remarkable. Classy and svelte, the bridge is formed of one central piece in solid gold, with openwork taken to the extreme.
The flat parts of the arch are polished, its sides are satin-finished and the long surfaces of its chamfers bevelled. These types of finishes and the level of quality achieved are those commonly applied to the components of Arnold & Son calibres. However, the dimensions of this bridge are considerably larger than they would be within a movement, and thus demanded exceptional care and precision.
Manual, hand crafted
At 45 mm, the case of the Globetrotter Gold is vast. The hemisphere was the guideline to its design and its surface area requires a certain amount of space. Above the equator are North America, Eurasia and part of Africa, all represented with a wealth of detail. In reality, the continents form a single rhodium-plated, polished sculpture. In contrast, the Atlas, Hoggar, Himalayan, Rocky, Ural and Alps mountain ranges are given a matt finish.
The oceans are hand painted with several coats of blue-pigmented lacquer enriched with pearlescent powder to bestow exceptional depth and shine. The coastlines are lighter on the blue colour scale with added Super-LumiNova, so that they stand out at night and further accentuate the relief of this small piece of manual craftsmanship.
Manufactured and finely crafted
The Globetrotter Gold is assembled on the Maison's automatic calibre A&S6022. Like all Arnold & Son movements, it has been entirely developed, produced, decorated, assembled, adjusted and fitted at their plant in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Its oscillating weight is 22-carat gold, skeletonised and features the Clou de Paris guilloché pattern.
The A&S6022 calibre is decorated with the traditional fine watchmaking motifs: stippled main plate, radiant Côtes de Genève bridges, satin-finished wheels and bevelled, polished screws. Its specific finishes are also NAC-treated. This type of plating uses precious metals close to platinum to produce a particularly high-quality anthracite result that perfectly matches the red gold case of the Globetrotter Gold.
Technical Specifications
Functions
- hours, minutes, and world times (24-hour ring)
Movement
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Calibre: A&S6022, mechanical self-winding
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Jewels: 29
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Diameter: 38.00 mm
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Thickness: 6.55 mm
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Power reserve: 45 hours
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Frequency: 4 Hz / 28,800 vph
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Finishes
main plate: stippled and NAC-treated
bridges: bevelled, polished and NAC-treated radiant Côtes de Genève
wheels: circular satin-finished and rhodium-plated
screws: bevelled and mirror-polished
oscillating weight: 22-carat red gold (5N), guilloché
Dial
- lacquered in shades of sunlit blue three-dimensional appliqués in 18-carat rose gold (4N) with Super-LumiNova
24-hour ring
- sapphire crystal with traced numbers
Dome of the earth
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continents: rhodium-plated and polished with matt-finished mountain range detailing
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oceans: hand painted in blue lacquer with pearlescent powder
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coastlines: hand painted in blue lacquer with pearlescent powder and Super-LumiNova
- bridge: 18-carat red gold (5N), with polished and satin-finished sides
Case
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Material: 18-carat red gold (5N)
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Diameter: 45.00 mm
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Crystal: domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on both sides
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Back: sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating
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Water-resistance: 30 metres/ 3 ATM
Strap
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Material: hand-stitched blue alligator leather
- Buckle: 18-carat red gold (5N) pin buckle
Product reference
- 1WTAR.U01C.
Limited edition
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28 pieces
CREATIVITY
As a contemporary Swiss watch brand, Arnold & Son continuously reinvents its approach to pay homage to the work of John Arnold, a man who provided solutions to the challenges of his era, notably the accuracy and reliability of timepieces. As a renowned watchmaker, he produced some of the most accurate marine chronometers of the 18th century and won several awards from the Bureau des Longitudes, spurring him on in his research into timekeeping. As an inventor, he filed a number of patents, including one for a compensation balance featuring a bimetallic balance-spiral (1775) and another for a helical balance spring with terminal curves (1782). He also produced simplified chronometer design principles that permitted mass production of these timepieces, a number of which were made available to His Majesty’s Royal Navy, making John Arnold one of its principal suppliers. One of his least known but most significant contributions was the modern definition of the term ‘chronometer’, which today refers to a high-precision timepiece driven by a movement that has passed an accuracy inspection carried out by an official neutral body.
AUTHENTICITY
A Fine Watchmaking House stands out for its mastery of the classics. Arnold & Son has based its identity on its ability to produce fine watchmaking complications that are linked to the heritage of John Arnold. These include true seconds (or dead-beat seconds) – a function recalling the escapements of pendulum clocks marking out the seconds – and dual time zones driven by twin regulating organs, which hark back to the original method of maritime positioning. The moon-phase displays also illustrate the brand’s mastery of the classics, while revealing a more unconventional side through the use of large moons in sculpted gold. Lastly, the power reserves of up to eight days offered by Arnold & Son pay homage to marine chronometers, which also benefited from an impressive autonomy.
The twenty or so calibres presented to date by Arnold & Son have all been conceived, designed, developed, machined, decorated, assembled and adjusted by its sister Manufacture, La Joux-Perret. This independence and creativity demonstrate the House’s ability to perpetuate John Arnold’s exceptional inventions.
AESTHETICS
The style of Arnold & Son timepieces is instantly recognisable. The three-dimensional architecture of their movements, the late-18th-century-style cantilever balance-cocks, the George-V-style bridges, the constant quest for multiaxial symmetry and the artfully crafted guilloché dials go hand-in-hand with openworked components, from a single barrel to the full range of grande complication calibres.
EXCLUSIVITY
Arnold & Son’s remarkably balanced collections are all produced in limited series and distributed around the world through carefully selected points of sale. They are priced fairly, because excellence is bound to honesty.
As Swiss watches with English roots, they stand out without being ostentatious. Arnold & Son timepieces are a delight for the eyes and the mind, and are aimed at customers who are looking for something unique.
Astronomy, Chronometry and World Time
Arnold & Son's three founding principles
Throughout human history, measuring time has always referred to the stars. It was by observing certain stars and understanding their cycle that the first calendars were established with impressive accuracy. It took several millennia before this precision was enclosed in a timepiece like the ones designed by John Arnold.
The golden age of maritime explorations and discoveries ushered this precision into a new technical ideal – determining longitude at sea. Its immediate corollary was the identification of local time, which changed constantly as the observer moved along an east-west axis. Astronomy, chronometry and what we now call world time are thus inextricably linked within one and the same question, to which John Arnold and his son devoted their lives, their art and their genius.
This is how these three dimensions – astronomy, chronometry and world time – have come to be embodied in the House's contemporary timepieces. Echoes of John Arnold's inventions and preoccupations, these pillars represent the foundations on which the Arnold & Son collections are based.
Chronometry: Be accurate
Rate accuracy, which is known as chronometry, is the key requirement of Arnold & Son's contemporary watchmaking. It is the standard of excellence for its collections, the first condition to be met and constantly checked, whether it is at the forefront or in the background of a watch designed by Arnold & Son. It is the most discreet of a movement's characteristics.
When building an Arnold & Son collection, all the thinking is focused on this chronometry. The manufacture calibres are based on advanced technical fundamentals that are not necessarily the best known. One of them is the choice of small, lightweight balances capable of rapidly returning to their isochronous rate after the latter has been disturbed by inevitable everyday shocks. Another is the routine use of large barrels or even two series-coupled barrels to store the energy required for the movement to function. They consequently provide Arnold & Son's manual winding calibres with above-average power reserves of 90 hours and more. A third is the particular attention paid to manufacturing the gear trains, roller-burnishing the pinions and polishing the gear teeth, as well as the precision of the machining and therefore the relative positions of the moving parts, a key concept in rate accuracy.
The tourbillon (or the fact of putting the regulating organ in rotation on its axis to best adjust the effects of gravity on the balance and its hairspring) was patented after John Arnold's death, but it was undoubtedly at the heart of his chronometric research and discussions with his friend Abraham-Louis Breguet, who incidentally assembled his first tourbillon on a John Arnold pocket watch in homage to this great watchmaker. Nowadays, the tourbillon has become a must in Arnold & Son collections.
While the tourbillon was not a complication in John Arnold's time, constant force underpinned the design of his marine chronometers. The regularity of the rate of the sprung balance relies on the consistency of the energy that it receives. However, this naturally fluctuates due to the circular and spiral nature of the mainspring contained in the barrel. To achieve a perfectly smooth torque, in other words a constant force, Arnold & Son uses a one-second constant-force mechanism. Housed just before the escapement, it stores up a small but always equal amount of energy in a secondary spring, the remontoire. Thus, every second, the sprung balance receives very precisely the same force to power its oscillations. These become more even, thereby creating the conditions for a high-precision rate.
Arnold & Son also works with another of John Arnold's historical chronometry indicators: deadbeat seconds, a mechanism that was indispensable to navigators at the time for calculating longitude. This mechanism advances one step each second, rather than six or eight smaller jumps in sync with the frequency of the balance. Instead of the term deadbeat seconds, Arnold & Son prefers a name whose very sound means accuracy: “true beat second”. Its jump is a signature of John Arnold's marine chronometers and a complication that is still alive and well in the House's collections.
Astronomy: Under the sky
The Pole Star, Southern Cross, astrolabes and sextant: measuring time has relied on the recurrence of astronomical phenomena in order to find long, reliable points of reference there that can be used under any conditions. The fruit of the human ingenuity, patience and dedication of countless observers and astronomers from every culture, these markers of cyclical time are foundational for Arnold & Son watchmaking.
Astronomical complications are a signature of Arnold & Son collections, with the moon as the heavenly body of choice, main subject and major inspiration. The distinctive feature of the Brand's moon phase timepieces is that they feature “astronomical” display precision as a matter of course. This term corresponds to an accumulated one-day deviation in the moon phase display every 122 years. Since setting this complication requires great finesse, the Arnold & Son moons generally have a double display with a secondary indicator on the case back next to the movement. This extremely rare display bears witness to Arnold & Son's involvement in all types of development and reflects its favoured themes, which are as much chronometric as astronomical.
Over and above their precision, Arnold & Son's moon phases attract all the light, either with a large moon opening up over half the dial, or with a 12-mm three-dimensional rotating moon, making it the largest of all moons. Whether in two or three dimensions, the moon is always treated as a small work of artistic craftsmanship, composed of materials that are rare in watchmaking such as marble or Paraíba tourmaline, or delicate such as mother-of-pearl, meteorite or aventurine glass. The Arnold & Son moon also shines at night, often with a subtle addition of luminescent material.
World Time: Here, elsewhere, everywhere
With ocean navigation, humankind divided up the world and invented longitudes, which were calculated by comparing the local time, observed using the sun, and the time at a starting point, kept by an extremely reliable timepiece. John Arnold was one of the leading suppliers of chronometers to the British Navy. He was the one who successfully improved the reliability and simplified the production of these indispensable marine chronometers, so much so that he became a benchmark among great explorers such as James Cook and later Dr David Livingstone. The indication of several time zones is therefore integral to Arnold & Son's watchmaking identity.
As this navigation was itself inseparable from cartography, for this world time complication Arnold & Son has chosen to depict a three-dimensional terrestrial hemisphere, making it possible to tell what time it is at any point.
In parallel to this graphic vision, Arnold & Son has developed a second approach to the time elsewhere in the world: with a double tourbillon featuring two distinct rotating regulating organs, making it possible to follow time zones offset by 15, 30 or 45 minutes compared to a full hour – a freedom in terms of setting that remains extremely rare.
Once again, and because this double display is based on a profoundly chronometric complication, Arnold & Son’s fundamental principles are interwoven. One never advances alone; there are always two – if not three – together. This is how a pillar's strength is measured: it relies on the next one, creating the conditions for a solidity that stands the test of time.