LEDERER
Bernhard Lederer has spent four decades on problems that most watchmakers accept as settled. Trained in Germany and established in Saint-Blaise on Lake Neuchâtel, he is a member of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants and has built movements for other houses as often as under his own name.
The Central Impulse Chronometer
Presented in 2020, the Central Impulse Chronometer takes up a question posed by Breguet and pursued by the American watchmaker Charles Fasoldt: how to deliver a constant impulse to the balance. Two independent gear trains, each with its own barrel and its own remontoir d’égalité, alternate in driving a natural escapement, so the balance receives an impulse of unvarying force however far the mainsprings have unwound.
Chronometry as the Point
The result is a watch whose architecture is dictated entirely by rate stability rather than by display or decoration. Output is measured in a few pieces a year, each finished by hand in the workshop, and each built on the conviction that precision remains an open problem rather than a solved one.