Debate About Tourbillon

H. Bouasse, professor at the Science Faculty of Toulouse, France, adds fuel to the tourbillon controversy, in which he writes in his book "Pendule, Spiral Diapason": "In order to cancel the centering errors of the balance, someone had the ingenious idea of making it turn: this resulted in the tourbillon escapement, but its high price and problematic advantages reduced it to being a historical curiosity...Experience shows that in the end, the use of this "perfected" system involves considerable costs. It is ingenious but far too complicated."

In fact, energy distribution in a watch is carried out during the rotation of the escape wheel. For a tourbillon-equipped watch, it is at that moment too that the tourbillon cage turns. It consumes a great deal of energy to start the cage moving and hardly is it launched then it stops suddenly against the escapement pinion whose wheel has just come to rest. The faster the tourbillon cage turns, behold the more spectacular its operation and the more it consumes energy at a loss. It can be argued that the tourbillon is an additional mechanism, a parasitic mechanism, that consumes energy taken from the mainspring destined to the balance and balance spring. As a result, the balance with less energy will have reduced advantages. On the whole tourbillon watches time less well than conventional watches of the same size, yet another aspect in the tourbillon controversy.

Nowadays, with the precision of quartz watches and radio controlled or atomic watches whose accuracy is ± 1 second every 1 million years, it begs the question of what "purpose" such a device now serves. While the tourbillon regulator was probably of greatest benefit to an escapement whose function saw use mainly in the vertical positions, such as in a pocket watch, its value to the performance of escapement in conventional wristwatches is arguably dubious, furthering the tourbillon controversy. Still, it is clear that the tourbillon was never intended by its inventor to be a practical and common answer for everyday timekeeping, and to criticize it because of this is missing the point. The tourbillon exists for the same reason that Formula 1 racing cars exits - not because it is something we need, but as a demonstration of the edge of the envelope - the forward edge of man's technical creativity and skill.

The tourbillon therefore, doesn't really serve a practical purpose... It serves an aesthetic need.