IWC Schaffhausen
IWC’s History in Material Innovation
IWC Schaffhausen
IWC’s History in Material Innovation
Titanium
Titanium is so damnably strong and crazily resistant that it was used extensively in the US Air Force’s spy plane SR-71 Blackbird that for over 30 years held the record as the fastest plane ever created. At its top speed of over 3,500 kilometers an hour, most metals would simply melt and disintegrate because of the heat generated by aerodynamic resistance. But not titanium. The Blackbird was so fast that standard operational procedure when a surface-to air missile was fired was simply to outrun it. The Blackbird could only be produced by fabricating its skin and structure largely from titanium.
Finally, titanium has found its way into IWC’s Ingenieur family, in several different watches from the Double Chronograph to the AMG Chronograph, and of particular interest, in a Digital Perpetual Calendar limited edition, all of which we are pleased to offer here..
Ceramic Zirconium Oxide
Ceramic is a crystalline material like glass that can be made into complex shapes boasting high strength, light weight and is almost totally impervious from scratches from any material save diamond. It is strong as hell. So strong it’s used for the plates in bulletproof vests and to reinforce tank armor. It’s also used in dental implants, as the coating in jet engines and for the brake discs in F1 cars thanks to its low thermal conductivity, and for knives that hold their edge better than their steel counterparts thanks to their hardness.
The idea of a scratchproof watch begins as far back as 1962 with the Rado DiaStar, which won both the Red Dot Award and the IF Design Award. This watch achieved its Herculean resistance with a case made from tungsten carbide, the hardest metal on Earth.
In 1986, IWC followed up this incredible achievement in movement design with another world’s first — a ceramic case used in a serially produced Swiss mechanical watch, the reference 3755. The resulting timepiece was a marvel to behold. A round black body complimented by mobile yellow-gold lugs, a definitive penning of the blueprint of high watchmaking’s future.
The next use of ceramic appeared in 1994 with the arrival of the brand’s now-iconic Flieger or Pilot’s Chronograph. This was a downsized version of the brand’s game-changing 1991 Doppelchronograph. Read the story on this watch here. Indeed, the dial-side iconography was essentially identical to that of the split-seconds chronograph — the pared-back diameter of 39mm and supreme functionalism made for a watch that was universally beloved from the onset. But the real buzz around this launch was that IWC had taken the occasion to launch not just one, but two versions of the Flieger — the reference 3706 with a steel case and the reference 3705 with a black case.
By pioneering the use of zirconium oxide, IWC had paved the way for an entire generation of blacked-out watches from brands as diverse as Panerai to Audemars Piguet to Richard Mille — indeed, none of this would have been possible without its daring, pioneering move. For this reason, both the Da Vinci 3755 and the Flieger 3705 deserve their place in modern watchmaking’s history books.
The next ceramic Pilot’s Watch was the limited-edition Doppelchrono reference 3786 in ceramic, dating to 2006. This was followed up the next year with a non-limited-edition “Top Gun” version of the same watch, this time with small red fighter-plane motifs on the seconds hands.
The “Top Gun” range of watches, in association with yes, that fighter pilot school in Miramar, California, was also where we first saw the appearance of ceramic as the case material for the iconic Big Pilot model in both the standard seven-day power reserve as well as perpetual calendar versions.
Ceramic has also been used to great effect by IWC in the Ingenieur family of watches such as this stunning blacked-out AMG version.