The world premier Meccanico model is a perfect mirror of what makes the de Grisogono brand – this year celebrating its 15th anniversary – strong and successful. Its founder and president, Fawaz Gruosi, has always made bold styling rather than technique the selling point of his creations.

This time, the Meccanico returns to a fashion that died in the 1970s with the advent of quartz: the digital indication of time – in this case a second timezone – with a mechanical movement. The way it works is novel in a wristwatch. Until now, the conventional system was based on discs printed with numbers that appeared in an aperture. The Meccanico uses rotating segments with four faces for each of the seven segments constituting a digit in the same way as the micro panels of an electronic digital indication. The complexity of such a mechanism is both impressive and marvellous to an engineer such as I, but it is more of a challenge to justify a solution that could increase the risk of breakdown and that uses so much energy as to limit the power reserve to 35 hours, despite the more than generous dimensions of the case.

What I like about the Meccanico is thus more the ingenuity and manual skills that it obviously required from the technicians in charge of its development. The manually wound movement comprises 651 parts – three times the number in a selfwinding movement with the analogue indication of two timezones. The digital indication forced the constructors to find solutions that had never before been tried in portable timepieces, because this mechanism uses the same methods as for digital clocks or those advertisement panels that were to be found not long ago in airport terminals. Twenty-three cams linked to gear-trains and to a release and synchronisation device each drive one of the 23 segments that make up the digital indication. This is a perfect illustration of the tiny scale involved – the smallest of the segments is just 2.9mm long for a weight of only 10 milligrams. Each segment has four faces in opposing pairs: two, with colour panels are visible; the other two are invisible. One or more segments rotate instantly through 90 degrees to change to the next hour. Each change puts into action between one and 12 segments, depending on the hour indicated. For the greater pleasure of all, most of the movement, particularly the driving cams for the digital display, is visible through the transparent dial.

Such an engine needs a big case; this one is 56mm high for a width of 48mm. It is available in rose gold, in titanium, or in a combination of titanium and rubber, rose gold or platinum. In all versions the pushpieces and crown-guard are in vulcanised rubber.

Produced in a limited edition, it can only make 177 owners happy. They will find enough to arouse their curiosity and, who knows, to incite them to a career as a watchmaker or inventor.