The World’s Most Expensive Timepiece

The World’s Most Expensive Timepiece

Daylight saving time 2016 will begin on Sunday, March 13 at 2:00 a.m. In honor of this annual time-change Sierra Sotheby’s International Realty brings you the story of the most expensive and complicated watch in the world. Made by Patek Philippe in 1932, the Supercomplication pocket watch sold at Sotheby’s auction in November 2014 for over…

March 9, 2016

2–3 minutes

Made by Patek Philippe in 1932, the Supercomplication pocket watch sold at Sotheby’s auction in November 2014 for over $24 million U.S. dollars, fetching the most anyone has ever paid for a timepiece, including both pocket watches and wristwatches.

Its original owner was New York-based American businessman Mr. Henry Graves Jr., who had specially commissioned Patek Philippe to produce “the world’s most complicated timepiece” – no matter the cost.

A “complication” is a technical term referring to any feature on a watch that is in addition to simply telling the time – and Graves wanted more than anyone. Supercomplication has 24 of them including Westminster chimes, a perpetual calendar, sunrise and sunset times, and a celestial map of New York as seen from Graves’s apartment on Fifth Avenue.

“The Supercomplication was part of an ‘unofficial competition’ with the automotive pioneer James Packard,” says Daryn Schnipper, chairman of Sotheby’s watch division.

“A man of ‘self-made wealth’, Packard was fascinated with complicated watches and had an edge on Graves because of his ‘engineering mind’, says Stacy Perman, author of A Grand Complication: The Race To Build The World’s Most Legendary Watch.

“The Packard watch, with 10 complications, had been the ‘piece de resistance’. It featured the first sky chart ever on a watch – a celestial map of the sky above his home in Ohio made with 500 gold stars.”

In order to beat Packard’s watch, Graves commissioned the Supercomplication for $15,000 in 1925 (adjusting for inflation that is roughly $202,000). It wasn’t actually delivered to him until 1933. It is possible that Patek Philippe would have bested its own work after delivering the Supercomplication to Graves, however, Packard died in 1928 putting an end to the rivalry.

The watch has 900 parts and remains the most complicated watch built without the assistance of computers, according to Sotheby’s. One of its functions shows sidereal time, which is based on the amount of time it takes the Earth to make two consecutive transitions of a meridian by a fixed star. A sidereal day is approximately 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds.

Supercomplication previously sold at auction in 1999 for $11 million making it the most expensive timepiece in the world.

At the time of auction in 2014 Sotheby’s reported that it had last been wound in 1969 and is still working.