Few brands have the ability to surprise quite like Urwerk, but it makes sense that such an unconventional watch brand would be the one most likely to leave us all scratching our heads in wonder and confusion (in the best way possible, of course). Their latest creation, the Spacetime Blade, is based on a design that made its debut last year ahead of the scuttled Only Watch auction. The clock, outfitted with a series light bulbs lit by Nixie tubes, provides pretty much all the timing information you could want, and plenty you didn’t know you needed, all in a very Urwerk way.
What we have here is a glass blade that stands 1.7 meters tall and weighs 20 kilograms. It’s an imposing, large object, made up of a total of 1,446 components. It stands on a large bronze crown that’s been polished and buffed to Urwerk’s preferred level of patina, and provides a base to a large glass dome that protects a series of vertically aligned Nixie bulbs, eight in total.
Each bulb contains a total of ten steel cathodes that allow it to illuminate any digit, 0 through 9. The glass is blown by hand and the electrical elements are meticulously assembled by hand as well, using tweezers, in each of the bulbs. According to Urwerk, each bulb consists of 88 parts.
Once the blade is assembled and the whole thing is turned on, it’s capable of displaying a variety of information via the Nixie bulbs. The Spacetime Blade has several different modes, and can read the time in hours, minutes, and seconds (in a “standard” format or to the 1/10th of the hour and 1/100th of a second), the day, month and year, and it can also tell you the daily rotation of the earth (in kilometers), the earth’s revolution around the sun over a one day period (in kilometers), and the earth’s revolution around the sun over a one year period (also in kilometers).
It’s these three final modes of the Spacetime Blade that really get to the heart of why it exists. Urwerk, of course, is a brand obsessed with alternative methods of telling the time. That frequently manifests itself in their now well understood satellite system of reading the time, but it’s all inspired by the idea that time is also distance, and the earliest methods of tracking the passage of time involved noting the movements of celestial bodies in relation to one another. The reason the Spacetime Blade is a blade at all is because it was inspired by gnomons, the component of a sundial that casts a shadow, keeping time relative to the sun itself.
Urwerk is making 33 Spacetime Blades, and each carries a retail price of CHF 55,000. More information at Urwerk here.
