‘I’m a sufferer of my very own incapability to compromise,’ the watchmaker Richard Mille as soon as stated. ‘Each time I get to a degree the place I have to resolve [whether] to avoid wasting price or to push efficiency to the very excessive, I all the time select the latter course.’

Richard Mille has solely been creating watches for 20 years, but throughout that point he has gained a status for pioneering the usage of unconventional — and sometimes unprecedented — supplies in his fixed quest for technical evolution.

In 2013, nevertheless, when Mille unveiled the RM56-01 mannequin, the Swiss watchmaker made what was arguably its greatest leap ahead.

Carved from a single block of sapphire crystal, the RM56-01 (beneath) is nearly fully clear, its very important organs showing to drift in mid-air on the wearer’s wrist. Paradoxically, the watch’s brilliance is totally invisible.

Sapphire has been prized within the watch business for nearly a century. It was first used as a stronger various to glass for protecting dial lenses in 1929. But it surely’s solely previously few a long time that watchmakers have begun to undertake it as a substitute for elements historically hewn from metallic.

Following years of analysis and testing, Richard Mille first deployed sapphire mechanics in 2008, when the corporate joined forces with Boucheron to create a watch that celebrated the Parisian jeweller’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. Known as the RM018 and restricted to 30 items, it contained a mechanism during which among the metallic plates had been changed with cut-sapphire equivalents — an unimaginable achievement.

5 years later, nevertheless, when Richard Mille launched the RM56-01, the boundaries of sapphire’s horological software shifted massively.

Utilizing diamond-tipped instruments, a strong block of sapphire was minimize to kind the RM56-01 case’s entrance bezel, again bezel and caseband. The milling of those three elements is so exact, with minuscule screw holes and a sublime, ergonomic curve custom-shaped to the human wrist bone, that it required a brand-new piece of computerised equipment able to reaching accuracy to a fraction of a millimetre.

This machine was employed for twenty-four hours a day over the course of 40 days to create the physique of every RM56-01. One other 350 hours was then spent sprucing the crystal to make it completely clear.

Richard Mille’s quest for excessive transparency didn’t cease there. With the intention to permit mild to go proper via the watch’s interior workings, its base plate, central bridge and third wheel had been all delicately machined from sapphire as effectively.

The RM56-01’s use of sapphire isn’t fully beauty. The laboratory-grown materials scores 9 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness (solely diamond ranks 10), making the watch extremely secure and nearly indestructible. Sapphire’s excessive boiling level additionally makes it resistant to excessive temperature variations, which may in any other case trigger elements to contract and broaden, whereas its smoothness reduces friction and vitality consumption.

The applying of sapphire doesn’t come on the expense of the RM56-01’s performance both. The watch is fitted with a skeletonised tourbillon for precision timekeeping throughout fast and excessive actions, in addition to a power-reserve indicator, which acts like a race automobile’s gasoline gauge, and a torque indicator that helps the wearer wind the watch’s mainspring to optimum precision.

Lastly, 24 aerospace-grade titanium screws and two clear rubber O-ring seals make the sapphire watertight to a depth of 30 metres.

The general result’s, in Richard Mille’s personal phrases, ‘exemplary chronometric efficiency’.

When Richard Mille launched his watchmaking enterprise, at Basel World in 2001, excessive applied sciences and an obsession with precision efficiency had been the 2 pillars of his mission. His first watch, the RM001 (above), included a revolutionary silver base plate bonded with a layer of PVD (bodily vapour deposition) particles that lowered the necessity for lubrication.

Typifying Mille’s insatiable urge for food for innovation, earlier than the RM001’s preliminary run of 17 watches had even been completed, the silver base plate was switched for a titanium counterpart that lowered weight and elevated sturdiness.

By the point Mille launched the RM003 in 2004, the bottom plate had been switched once more, this time to carbon nanofibre. Created beneath 740 bars of stress and temperatures surpassing 2,000 levels Celsius, the fabric turns into thermally insensitive and shock-resistant.

This was adopted in 2005 by the introduction of a case created from an aeronautical-grade silicon-aluminium alloy and a base plate created with lithium, which meant that the RM009 — developed for racing driver Felipe Massa — weighed simply 28 grammes, excluding the strap.

5 years later, the RM027, developed for tennis star Rafa Nadal, added copper, magnesium and zirconium to the alloy combine, pushing the watch’s weight down to simply 20 grammes — strap included.

Not lengthy after, the RM027 was upgraded to the RM027-02. It featured a brand new case materials known as TPT, which consists of tons of of layers of quartz interspersed with carbon, making the watch resistant to five,000 g-force of shock, electromagnetic waves and UV mild harm.

By the point Richard Mille got here to unveil the sapphire RM56-01 to the general public in 2013, many thought the bounds of a watch’s materiality couldn’t be pushed any additional.

The watch’s radical innovation, nevertheless, got here with a price — reportedly round $1.8 million, when you had been lucky sufficient to be invited to purchase one in every of simply 5 ever made.

This instance, which got here direct from its authentic proprietor, who has shut ties to the worlds of Ferrari and System 1, offered for CHF 3,654,000 on 6 November 2022 at Christie’s in Geneva.