Legacy Pledge: MB&F’s LM1

What’s this? Has Max Büsser gone conventional on us? Today’s launch of the LM1, the first MB&F Legacy Machine, took the watch world by surprise not with its radical timekeeping vision, but rather with its traditional, round case. Following the sci-fi HM4 and HM3, expectations were no doubt pinned on yet an even more fantastical contraption. Not this time, responded Büsser, who decided to directly reference watchmaking history instead of conjuring up another futuristic machine. His impetus for the new piece arose from thinking more about time travel à la Jules Verne rather than space travel à la Battlestar Galactica. He asked himself what kind of watch would he create if he were born 100 years earlier in 1867 rather than in 1967. Naturally, a round pocket watch was the inspirational starting point. But, while the LM1 pays tribute to watchmaking’s golden age of invention from 1780 to 1870, it still breaks some rules so as not to disappoint MB&F’s renegade fans.

Maximilian Büsser

What makes a watch a machine?

A mechanical watch is the ultimate machine! It is 100 percent made of metal, with tens or hundreds of moving parts, and the energy is also given (and stored) through mechanical processes. We call our timepieces machines because their primary focus (contrary to 100 percent of all other watches) is not to give time. The primary focus is to create a three-dimensional mechanical work of art, which by the way give time—but as a paradox, chronometry is, on the other hand, important for us. At MB&F we deconstruct the most beautiful traditional watch movements to reconstruct them as 3D machines. In fact the whole process of why we do this, and how we do it, makes up for at least half the interest of our creations.

Time Machines: Radical Watch Designs for the 21st Century

MB&F HM4 Thunderbolt

As I recently held MB&F’s latest twin-engine HM4, aptly dubbed Thunderbolt, I recalled the first time I saw the prototype for MB&F’s HM1 (Horological Machine Number 1) in a Geneva café before the nascent brand’s debut piece launched in 2006. Max Büsser took a huge risk by investing in a boutique brand that embodied his radical vision of watchmaking, and it has paid off with a devoted fan base enamored with the concept of wearing futuristic machines rather than watches. Though the Thunderbolt’s functions are straightforward—hours and minutes with power reserve—the design is anything but simple. Inspired by the model airplanes he assembled as a kid, Büsser’s titanium and sapphire crystal instrument was three years in the making, given the complexity of its specially designed 300-plus components.