Ludwig Oechslin was born in 1952, and before undertaking a watchmaking apprenticeship in 1984, he had pursued an academic career, with a doctorate in Philosophy, History of Research and Scholarship (Theoretical Physics) and Astronomy from the University of Bern.

Even while working as a watch repairer and watchmaker, Oechslin didn’t give up his academic pursuits, continuing to study pre-industrial technical archeology in the 1990s, with a particular interest in astronomical timekeeping, an interest which made him particularly well-suited to repair the Vatican’s astronomical clocks — one of the many interesting horological jobs Oechslin has held over his long career, with others including his stint as curator of the Musée International d’Horlogerie in Le Locle, and founder of his own brand Ochs & Junior (Oechslin sounds like “Little Ox” in German). But it is his long and enduring relationship with Ulysse Nardin for which he is most remembered.

The astronomical clock restored in the early 1980s by Ludwig Oechslin (Image: Wikipedia)

From 1983 through to 1990, Oeschlin developed the Trilogy of Time watches for Rolf Schnyder’s Ulysse Nardin: the Astrolabium Galileo Galilei, the Planetarium Copernicus and the Tellurium Johannes Kepler. These are just some of the movements Oechslin designed for Ulysse Nardin over his nearly 20 years at the brand. But the most famous of them all is, without a doubt, the Freak — a genre-defining watch that epitomizes watchmaking at the start of the third millennium.

Ulysse Nardin Freak