In-Depth: Jaeger-LeCoultre Launches The Reverso Quadriptyque, The Most Complicated Reverso Ever (2024)

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Jaeger-LeCoultre has applied the Hybris Mechanica name to a number of different watches, starting with a trio of highly complicated watches sold as a set, for $2.5 million, in 2009. For several years, JLC followed a number-series naming convention (the 2014 Master Ultra-Thin Minute Repeater Flying Tourbillon, for instance, was launched as Hybris Mechanica 11). Today, however, the company uses the caliber number rather than a series number, and the most recent addition to the Hybris Mechanica collection, launching at Watches & Wonders 2021, is the Hybris Mechanica Calibre 185 Quadriptyque. It's not only the most complicated Reverso ever made, it's one of the most complicated watches Jaeger-LeCoultre has ever made, period – by the company's count, a total of 11 complications.

Perhaps just as important as the sheer complexity of the watch is the effort JLC made to keep it wearable. Highly complicated timepieces can be, and often are, behemoths. An extreme example is the Patek Philippe Caliber 89 pocket watch, which was introduced in 1989 as the world's most complicated timepiece, with 33 complications. It weighs 1.1 kilos, and at 88.2 mm in diameter and 41.07 mm thick, you'd better have deep pockets in every sense. By contrast, the Hybris Mechanica Calibre 185 is just 51mm x 31mm x 15.15mm – for a watch of this complexity, remarkably manageable.

The complications are as follows. On the first face, there's an instantaneous perpetual calendar, with big date and indications for the day, month, year, and leap year, day/night indication. A flying tourbillon is visible through an aperture in the dial.

On the second face, there is another dial showing the time, with a digital jumping hour. Also visible are the components of the minute repeater. The minute repeater has a feature unique to just a few high-end repeaters from JLC. A minute repeater is a watch that chimes the time "on-demand," ringing the hours, quarter hours, and minutes when a slide in the case is pressed. Normally, there's a slight gap between each set of chimes – this is most noticeable when there are no quarters to chime. JLC has been working to reduce this delay, first in the Hybris Mechanica Master Ultra Thin Minute Repeater Flying Tourbillon (2014) and then the Master Grande Tradition Gyrotourbillon Westminster Perpétuel (2019), but this is the first JLC repeater in which the delays have been eliminated completely.

The remaining two "dials" are on the inside and back of the case cradle.

The third dial shows various aspects of the Moon's orbit – in particular, it displays three different versions of the lunar month. These cycles are the Synodic cycle, Draconic cycle, and Anomalistic cycle.

The Synodic cycle, or synodic month, is the lunar cycle with which most of us are familiar. It's simply the amount of time from one New Moon to the next – a month as determined by the phase of the Moon. This is shown at the top of the 3rd dial, by a very large moon-phase display in which an opaque blue lacquer disc, carrying a starfield, crosses the face of a laser-engraved Moon. The length of a Synodic month varies slightly throughout the year, but the average is rather exact: 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2.8016 seconds. A conventional moon-phase display rounds this off to 29.5 days. The Moon in this case is painted onto a disk with 59 teeth (actually two Moons, so that when one disappears at the New Moon, the other is ready to rotate into place) but after two and a half years, the moon-phase will be off by about a day. Higher-accuracy moon-phase displays have become the norm in high-end watches with astronomical complications – the Hybris Mechanica Calibre 185 Quadriptyque's is accurate to one day in 1,111 years. This is not to say that JLC expects the watch to run for 1,111 years straight, but it's a demonstration of precision engineering appropriate to the ambitious nature of the watch (I always like to think of high-precision moon-phases as being rather akin to extreme depth ratings in dive watches – you don't need it, but it's fun to know it's there).

Below it and to the left is a representation of the Draconic cycle. This is a little more complicated than the Synodic cycle. The Moon's orbit around the Earth is very slightly inclined with respect to the plane of the ecliptic – that's the plane on which most of the planets appear to travel as seen from the Earth, on their orbits around the Sun. It's not a lot – about 5.14º – but it's important to astronomers. This is because there are two points at which the Moon's orbit, and the plane of the ecliptic, intersect: These are the North and South Nodes, known in mythology as the Head and Tail of the Dragon (caput et cauda draconis).

The Ascending and Descending Nodes of the Moon's orbit, as seen from the Earth. Image, Wikipedia.

These are the two points at which an eclipse can happen, as if one of the Nodes is in a direct line between the Earth and the Sun, the Moon will perfectly block the solar disc from view (it is one of the interesting oddities of the Solar System that the Moon orbits the Earth, at least in the present era, at exactly the right distance to take up the same number of degrees of arc in the sky as the Sun). The display shows the Sun at the center, with the Moon orbiting around it – the number of degrees above or below the plane of the ecliptic is shown by the degrees scale in the counter. The two Nodes are shown by the traditional ancient symbols ☊ and ☋.

A Draconic month is 27days, 5hours, 5minutes, and 35.8seconds. The Nodes precess, or rotate in the sky, taking about 18.6 years to complete one rotation around the Earth.

Caput et Cauda Draconis

The third display, to the lower right of the moon-phase display, shows the Anomalistic cycle, or month. The Moon's orbit, like most orbits, is not circular, but elliptical. This means that it has an apogee – the point at which it's furthest from the Earth – and a perigee, the point at which it is nearest. If you draw a line between the two, you've marked the so-called major axis of the orbit. The Moon at apogee is 251,900 miles from the Earth and at perigee, 225,700 miles. The apogee and perigee are known collectively as the apsides, and the Anomalistic cycle is the length of time it takes for the Moon to return to an apsis. Like the Moon's Nodes, the apsides precess – the major axis of the Moon's orbit takes about 8.85 years to rotate once around the Earth. An Anomalistic month is 27days, 13hours, 18minutes, and 33.2seconds long.

Precession of the apsides of the Moon's orbit, as seen from a position below the Earth's South Pole. Image, Wikipedia.

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The one element of both the Anomalistic and Draconic cycles not shown are the precessions – of the Nodes, in the Draconic cycle, and the apsides in the Anomalistic. However, the gear trains for both displays have been calculated so as to accurately show the time differences between each of the cycles. You can't quite use the displays to predict a lunar eclipse, but they do show three distinctly different periods of the Moon's orbit – in fact, I can't recall any other astronomical wristwatch that shows the Anomalistic cycle specifically, and certainly not one that shows the Synodic, Anomalistic, and Draconic cycles simultaneously.

The fourth face of the watch is also the caseback, and it carries the most minimal amount of information of all the four faces – it shows the moon-phase as seen from the Southern Hemisphere.

Mechanically speaking, the heart of the watch is the perpetual calendar complication, which drives the other astronomical complications. The lunar cycles are updated once a day, at midnight, by a pin that extends from the main case into a pusher on the cradle. This is a solution JLC also used in the 2006 Reverso Hybris Mechanca Grande Complication à Triptyque.

That was already an exceedingly complicated watch. Cased in platinum, it featured a tourbillon with instantaneous perpetual calendar, showing the date, the Equation of Time, the transits of the signs of the Zodiac, sidereal time, a star chart, a sunrise and sunset time display, day/night indication, and power reserve. While the Triptyque and the Quadtriptyque share the same mechanical solution to the problem of advancing the indications in the cradle, there are many major differences between them – not the least of which is the repeater in the Quadriptyque, as well as the depiction of three distinct lunar cycles in the latter as well.

The minute repeater in the Quadriptyque, in addition to being able to omit the intermittent silences usually present in chiming complications, makes use of a couple of other JLC innovations. The gongs are directly attached to the sapphire crystal, for better sound transmission, and the gongs have a square cross-section rather than the round cross-section usually used for repeater gongs – the idea there is that the hammers have a larger surface area to strike, and therefore, energy transmission from the hammers to the gongs is improved.

The Quadriptyque also uses JLC's proprietary "trebuchet" repeater hammers (the trebuchet was a medieval siege engine – a kind of catapult) which were first used in the 2005 Master Minute Repeater Antoine LeCoultre. Here again, the idea was to improve energy transmission to the gongs, as well as to better control the depth of the hammer's strike and recoil (which can either produce a weak chime if the hammer is stopped too early in its swing, or a muted sound, and an unpleasant buzz, if it does not spring smartly away from the gong after striking).

Now, this sort of watchmaking obviously doesn't come along terribly often – in the first decade of the 2000s, there was quite a lot of competition to see who could produce the most unusual complications, and the most complicated watches, and we saw a proliferation of astronomical and other complications (including a plethora of multi-axis tourbillons). For JLC, however, complicated watchmaking is a deep part of its history. The company produced its first complicated Reverso – a tourbillon – back in 1993, and that in turn was built on its success as a maker of complicated movements (including tourbillons) going back many decades. (One wonderful example among many is the caliber 19 RMCCVEP, which was made around 1910 – an ultra-thin minute repeater chronograph, only 3.55mm thick.) The Quadriptyque is a new watch, with some very up-to-date engineering solutions, but it's also part of JLC's core identity as a movement maker and a complications specialist.

The Ref. Q7103420 Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Hybris Mechanica Calibre 185 Quadriptyque: case, 51.2mm x 31mm x 15.15mm, in white gold; water resistance 30 meters. Reverso with indications on the front and back of the case, and on the front and back of the case cradle:

Limited edition, 10 pieces worldwide. Price, €1.35 million (will vary in the U.S. based on exchange rate). Find out more at Jaeger-LeCoultre.com.

Visit Hodinkee affiliate Crown & Caliber to shop pre-owned Jaeger-LeCoultre models

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