Watchmaking in the News - Focus on Independents.

So without any further a due, welcome on edition number 61 of PRIMETIME and the big news was the filing for bankruptcy of HYT, the fluidic-horologists as they liked to call themselves and beyond HYT what does it mean, how can it be interpreted and what are the general impacts on the general watchmaking scene, in particular on the independent scene.

Well you guys know that on WATCHESTV we do have a little crush for these independents and one can quite easily say that today’s watchmaking creativity and audacity comes from the independents, creativity both in terms of some daring design options, but also on the technical side with also some pretty bold and ambitious developments and HYT was for sure a perfect example of this.

A bit less than 10 years ago, they introduced something which by definition you would never like to see in a watch, meaning liquids, but nevertheless, they managed to pull this off with some super high-tech and super precise capillary system, some kind of glass tubes developed by a team of rather brainy people, because we’re indeed talking hardcore science behind this.

So from the start, you had two companies, HYT, the watch brand, and Preciflex, the company which developed this capillary technology and the result meant that for the first time liquids would be used to indicate time inside a wristwatch and I say wristwatch because if you go back before the existence of mechanical watchmaking, clepsydras or water clocks are the true ancestors of time measuring devices going back to more than 3000 years.

Well anyhow, the principles used by HYT was more or less the same, but in a closed system with two different coloured liquids mechanically pushed from one container to the other and where they met this showed the actual hour and for more precision and legibility the minutes were showed traditionally with a regular hand.

I won’t come back on the entire story and all the models developed, but the first one was the H1 and when it was introduced it got so much attention, it was seriously quite crazy, they even made it on the cover of Wired magazine, told you, pretty insane coverage and unfortunately they didn’t really manage to transform this hype into a massive commercial success because there was a serious gap between this generated hype and the proper functioning of the first timepieces. If the announcement of this breakthrough could have been followed by the delivery of working timepieces, I can seriously promise you that it would have been a totally different ballgame!