Company logo |
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| Type | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Watch manufacturing |
| Founded | 1846 |
| Founder(s) | Ulysse Nardin |
| Headquarters | Le Locle, Switzerland |
| Products | Watches |
| Website | ulysse-nardin.ch |
Ulysse Nardin is a watch manufacturer founded in 1846 in Le Locle, Switzerland, where its headquarters remain. Historically, the company was best known for being a manufacturer of marine chronometers, but today it produces complicated mechanical watches.
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Founder, watchmaker Ulysse Nardin, was an accomplished watchmaker who studied horology under his father, Leonard-Frederic Nardin; Frederic William Dubois; and Louis Jean Richard-dit-Bressel in Switzerland.
Before the advent of quartz timepieces, merchant and military ships relied on highly accurate mechanical timepieces known as marine chronometers. The best known of these was the company's M,GR.F model. Of the 4,504 certificates for marine chronometers issued, 4,324 were issued to the company (Lucien F Trueb, Watchtime).
In 1983, the company was acquired by businessman Rolf Schnyder who, in conjunction with watchmaker Ludwig Oechslin, relaunched the brand with other investors. Schnyder, Oechslin and the company's staff design and create complication timepieces using modern materials and manufacturing techniques.
The base movement used on all versions of complication watches is the ETA. The new ETA 2892 movement, used by the company in its "New" collection, is popular because it is deemed accurate and reliable enough to be used as a base movement for many high-end manufacturers' complications. Most changes and updates were done in order to improve the efficiency of the automatic winding. The beat rate has been increased to 28,800 BPH, while the diameter of the movement was reduced from 28 millimeters to 25 mm. to allow it to be used in a wider range of cases. (Hence, the change in model number from 2890 to 2892.) The thickness, however, remains unchanged at 3.6 mm. This has the effect of reducing both the diameter and mass of the oscillating weight that was fixed in the 2892/A2 model. The 9 mm diameter balance compromises between weight and size.
The first example of the company's new approach was the Astrolabium Galileo Galilei (1985; named after the device Astrolabium, and the astronomer Galileo). The Astrolabium displays local and solar time, the orbits and eclipses of the sun and the moon, and the positions of several major stars. It was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 1989 as the world's most-functional watch (with 21 distinct functions). Oechslin followed the Astrolabium with two other astronomical watches, the Planetarium Copernicus (1988; named after the stargazing theaters called planetariums and the astronomer Copernicus) and the Tellurium Johannes Kepler (1992; named after the element tellurium, and astronomer Johannes Kepler). The three pieces constitute what the brand calls the Trilogy of Time.
Other notable complication watches are the GMT± Perpetual (1999), that combines a perpetual calendar with the GMT± complication (one-press buttons that adjust the hour hand back and forth for international travellers), and the Freak Blue Phantom (2001) a tourbillon watch with no crown and one mechanical hands that cranks along teeth embedded in the inner circumference of the watch face.
The company also revived the use of enameling in watchmaking, with a series of watches featuring enameled and cloisonné faces.