The Ulysse Nardin Freak at 25: How Watchmaking's Great Provocateur Won

The Swiss watch trade does not, by temperament, do stunts, which is why Ulysse Nardin understood the value of one on the night before Baselworld 2001. It skipped the official program, herded the international press into a basement and staged a carnival. A seven-person parade came down toward the stage behind the company's owner, Rolf Schnyder, who had put on a double mask, one side his own face and the other that of his watchmaker, Dr. Ludwig Oechslin. A fanfare went up, and then the reason for the costumes was set out on the stage: a watch with no dial, no hands and no crown, its bare movement revolving on itself to mark the hours. The company had only one possible name for it: the Freak.

The traditionalists in the room could be forgiven for treating the evening as a gag, since the costumes were the least radical thing on offer. The missing crown and dial were the easy provocations, the theatrical ones; the serious mischief sat underneath.

"The main revolution behind the Freak concept is that there is no mainplate. The caliber rotates on itself in order to indicate the time. As a result, 95% of the components are in motion," said Jean-Christophe Sabatier, the brand's chief product officer.

A conventional watch hides its movement beneath a dial and bolts it to a fixed plate; the Freak hoisted the entire engine into view and set it spinning, which left it needing parts that weighed next to nothing and would never call for oil.

What the watch needed was silicon, borrowed wholesale from the semiconductor industry, where it had nothing to do with telling time. The 2001 Freak used it sparingly, in the escape wheels alone, but no mechanical watch had carried the material before, and the timing was pointed: Omega had just put George Daniels' co-axial escapement into production, the first practical rethinking of how a movement releases its power in roughly 250 years, and the escapement had become the most contested ground in watchmaking.

"The very first silicon escapement, presented in the original Freak in 2001, opened the door to a new standard for the entire industry," Sabatier said. Light, untroubled by magnetism and able to run dry where steel needs oil, silicon was about to become the default material for the parts that keep time, though not on Ulysse Nardin's terms.

The material the Freak introduced did not remain the Freak's to give away, a wrinkle the anniversary tributes tend to skip. Silicon's easy victory was the escape wheel; the hairspring was the holdout, the slender coil that sets a watch's rate, and pure silicon kept wandering off that rate as it warmed and cooled. The cure, a silicon core sheathed in a thin skin of its own oxide, came not from Ulysse Nardin but from the Swiss research institute CSEM, which patented it in 2002. For the next twenty years that patent locked temperature-stable silicon hairsprings inside a closed circle of Patek Philippe, Rolex and the Swatch Group, with Ulysse Nardin let in by side agreement. Guarding that edge, the circle moved against outsiders: when Richemont fitted a silicon hairspring to an affordable Baume & Mercier, the holders threatened to sue and Richemont withdrew the part, according to the watch journal SJX. Not until the patent lapsed in 2022 did the material the Freak had smuggled into watchmaking finally belong to all of it.

For an object that rearranged the field, the Freak had improbable parentage. The rotating-movement idea was not Oechslin's but Carole Forestier-Kasapi's, who in 1997, at 23, won the Prix de la Fondation Abraham-Louis Breguet as the youngest entrant and the only woman in a field that, by Ulysse Nardin's account, included the canonized independents George Daniels and Philippe Dufour. Her prototype told time through its bezel and ran down too quickly to sell. Oechslin reworked its logic, moving the mainspring to the center of the case so it could hold a two-meter coil and a seven-day reserve, then promoting the movement from hidden mechanism to the display itself: the barrel turns once every 12 hours to show the hour, the carousel once an hour to show the minutes.

The men who finished the watch were no more conventional than its origins. Oechslin had trained as an archaeologist before he came to horology, and made his name rebuilding the Vatican's centuries-old astronomical clock. Schnyder, who bought the company in 1983, treated risk as recreation, and once entered the Hong Kong Water-Ski Marathon despite doing most of his skiing on snow, winning it on the first try. A firm run by that pair was never going to claw its way back to relevance with a tasteful three-hand dress watch.

"The very particular architecture of the timepiece (time set through the bezel, with no crown) led some collectors to come back to us with requests for improvements," Sabatier said. "The bezel could accidentally turn on itself, which is why a locking mechanism was added in the second product generation." The first refinements came not from the workshop but from the people who had bought the watch.

That generation arrived in 2005, and from then on the Freak served as the company's laboratory, on a frontier the rest of the trade was also working: Girard-Perregaux after a constant-force escapement, Zenith and TAG Heuer after new oscillators and spring materials. The Freak kept pace, taking on a tourbillon, then water resistance, then in 2018 a self-winding system the brand calls the Grinder, and in 2019 abandoning the hairspring altogether for a silicon oscillator running at 12 hertz, several times the beat of an ordinary movement. By the company's count the line now holds 35 patents, and the orbital construction it introduced has gone, conspicuously, uncopied. In 2023, the Freak ONE took the Iconic prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, the category set aside for watches that have shaped the craft across 20 years or more. Across generations the caliber has been rebuilt many times over, the geometry never. "But it will always remain orbital," Sabatier said.

Baselworld, where the Freak detonated in 2001, collapsed in 2020, and the trade now convenes at Watches & Wonders in Geneva, where Ulysse Nardin, marking both its 180th year and the Freak's 25th, unveiled the Super Freak this spring, a 511-component movement it bills as the most complicated time-only watch ever made, hung with a string of world-firsts, the first automatic double tourbillon among them. The company works both extremes of the concept now, a slimmed Freak [X] made for daily wear, from $41,200 to $64,000, and the Super Freak, limited to 50 pieces, each priced at $393,600. Asked what he made of the new machine, Oechslin did not reach for modesty. "It's a diamond of mechanics," he said.