The
Caseback.
The first clock was the sky.
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SW0284 · Story 05
Astrolabe engraving · 316L
Astrolabe engraving · 316L
Turn the watch over and you won’t find a logo, or a wall of specifications. You’ll find the sky.
I
The Instrument
The caseback is engraved with a map of the heavens, drawn from the framework of the astrolabe.
The ancient instrument astronomers, navigators, and scholars used to read the stars. With it, they could find the time, the date, their latitude, and the positions of the bodies moving overhead.
Saturn among them.
The Engraving
A map of the heavens, the way the first astronomers drew it.
Fig. 01 · Astrolabe engraving · the caseback
316L steel · engraved
II
The Method
Our engraving isn’t a literal chart of Saturn’s orbit. It honors the method.
The older, patient way of following a planet across the sky by observation alone, long before anyone had numbers or gears to do it for them.
III
The First Clock
Because that’s where timekeeping actually began: not in a movement, but in a person looking up.
The first clock was the sky.
The first clock was the sky.
Fig. 02 · The Astrolabe, brass inlaid with silver, 1291; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
IV
Against the Wrist
I wanted that idea resting quietly against the wrist, in the one place only the owner ever sees.
A reminder of where time-telling started, and a nod to the planet this brand takes its name from.
“This isn’t decoration. It’s history, carried forward in metal.” On the caseback
