When it comes to creating a new watch, Oris’s engineers and designers share a common goal – to make a watch that makes sense. Every piece has to be superbly engineered and beautifully designed, too, but before anything else, Oris watches have to serve a purpose in the real world. It’s this philosophy that inspired the Big Crown ProPilot Caliber 114, a high-functioning wristwatch with a 24-hour second time zone.
This, however, is no ordinary second time zone watch – for two reasons. First, because it’s powered by an in-house Oris caliber. Caliber 114 is the fifth in a series of Oris calibers, all of which share a common base architecture that sees them deliver a 10-day power reserve and a non-linear power reserve indicator (an Oris-patented device that means the power remaining until the watch needs rewinding is shown in ever-greater detail as the hand moves around the subdial at 3 o’clock).
And second, Oris has engineered the 24-hour second time zone so it can be adjusted in half hours. Why? A curious number of states sit between time zones, on the half hour. States operating half-hour time zones, known as fractional time zones, include all or parts of Australia, Canada, India, Iran, Afghanistan, Burma and Sri Lanka. Oris has introduced the function to accommodate the needs of travellers to and from those countries. Caliber 114. A watch that gives you all the time in the world. All the time in the world Oris’s Caliber 114 has a 24-hour time zone that will take you to the ends of the Earth.
What does it mean to make your own movements? Or even matter? To the naked eye, perhaps not much. But when it comes to the heart and soul of a watch, and the story of the company behind it, it makes all the difference in the world. Oris was founded in 1904 and quickly expanded so that it was soon producing all manner of watch parts and even the machinery required to manufacture them. By 1979, the company had produced almost 270 different in-house calibers, consistently innovating and improving the quality and performance of its watches.
The Quartz Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s meant Oris had to put its manufacturing ambitions on hold. But in 2014, on the occasion of the company’s 110th anniversary, Oris announced that it had freed up its movement development program for the first time in 35 years. Back in the company’s Hölstein base, a team of in-house engineers had been working for five years to deliver a movement that was worthy of the Oris name and heritage, and that would go down in history.
