Minute repeater
A watch that strikes the time on demand, hours, quarters and minutes, on two tiny gongs, at the push of a slide in the case.
Before electric light, a watch was no use in the dark. For most of its history the only way to know the time at night was to light a candle or to own a watch that could say the time aloud. A repeater does exactly that: push the slide and it strikes the hours, then the quarters, then the minutes, so the time can be heard without being seen. Earlier repeaters stopped at the quarter; the minute repeater, which strikes to the minute, is the one that survived.
The code is the same on almost every repeater. Hours are struck on the low gong. Each quarter past the hour is a pair of notes, high then low, the ding-dong. The minutes past the last quarter are struck on the high gong. So 10:25 is ten low notes, one pair for the quarter, and ten high notes for the ten minutes after it; 3:00 is three low notes and nothing else.
The sound is generated in your browser from two tuned gongs; a real repeater’s tone depends on its case and gongs, and no two sound alike.
Pushing the slide does two things. It winds a small spring of its own, so the striking never borrows power from the mainspring that keeps time, and it lets three racks fall. Under the dial, three stepped cams called snails turn with the hands: the hour snail, twelve steps on a star wheel that jumps once an hour; the quarter snail, four steps on the cannon pinion; and the minute snail, four lobes of fourteen steps. Each rack falls until its feeler lands on a step, and the depth of the fall is the count. As the spring then drives the racks back, every tooth that passes lifts a hammer and lets it drop onto its gong. The all-or-nothing piece makes sure a half-pushed slide strikes nothing rather than the wrong time, and a small retractable step called the surprise piece stops the minute rack from reading the old quarter in the moment the quarter changes.
It costs a great deal. The gongs need a case that can ring, so a repeater is thin, lightly sealed, and sounds different in steel, gold or platinum; water resistance and chiming pull in opposite directions. The hammers and gongs are tuned by ear, one watch at a time, and watchmakers rate it the hardest complication to make sound right.
The need vanished in the nineteenth century, with the safety match and then the electric light, and the repeater turned into the summit of the craft. Patek Philippe built its first minute repeater in 1845; the first on the wrist came in 1892, with an Audemars Piguet movement in a Louis Brandt & Frère case. The modern chapter is about sound: cathedral gongs that wrap almost twice round the movement for a longer note, Audemars Piguet’s Supersonnerie of 2015, which mounts the gongs on a membrane inside the caseback, and the Bulgari Octo Finissimo of 2016, a minute repeater just 6.85 mm thick.
Historian’s noteWho made the first minute repeater is not settled. Thomas Mudge of London is often credited, around 1750, but the British Museum, which owns his minute-repeating watch of 1757 made for Ferdinand VI of Spain, does not call it the first, and notes an English minute repeater signed Ellicott of about 1738. The Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie places the earliest examples in southern Germany around 1700–1710. What is documented is the quarter repeater of 1687, when Edward Barlow and Daniel Quare each put one before James II and Quare’s was preferred, and Breguet’s gong spring of about 1783, which replaced the bell and gave the repeater the voice it has today.