It’s becoming something of a habit. On September 21 one of the industry’s most discreet and affable CEOs, Jean-Marie Schaller, was back in the limelight for the presentation, in Geneva, of a third Guinness World Record™. The first was awarded for the invention of the chronograph: an exploit attested by the Compteur de Tierces, which was completed in 1816 and is still fully functional. The second was for the first high-frequency stopwatch (for the same Compteur de Tierces). This latest distinction honours an unprecedented creation: the Cosmopolis.
The only one of its kind, this 40mm timepiece combines 12 different meteorite fragments. Among them, Dhofar 461, a lunar meteorite with a white speckled interior; Allende, the oldest rock in the solar system; Erg Chech, the oldest known magmatic rock, which broke off from a lost baby planet, and Jbilet Winselwan whose traces of amino acids could be the first sign of life in the universe. Is this what counts? Probably not, for as everyone knows, a record exists solely to be broken.
Cosmopolis is more than simply a watch. As the historian Dominique Fléchon so appositely wrote, “horology is the child of astronomy.” The measurement of time originated with observations of the stars and planets, as Cosmopolis reminds us. But there is more.
These observations would not have been possible without the development of precision instruments, capable of measuring the extraordinary velocity of an object moving at absolute speed through the universe and, paradoxically, its almost imperceptible movement at relative speed, as we see it from Earth. One such instrument is Louis Moinet’s Compteur de Tierces. And so to paraphrase Dominique Fléchon, Cosmopolis is a child of the Compteur de Tierces.
Who knows? Perhaps one day Cosmopolis’s record will be broken by a thirteenth meteorite, but that would be missing the point. In April next year, it will be 20 years since Jean-Marie Schaller founded Les Ateliers Louis Moinet, “just me, a few ideas and not much in the way of resources,” as he likes to remind people. To create a fully independent brand from scratch, with your own money, on the basis of a name known in its day only to a handful of experts, was – and remains – an exploit. Jean-Marie Schaller has accomplished what he set out to do. Cosmopolis is witness to these first two decades. And the beginning of the two decades to come.
