A story of design and hope. A one-year wonder, a hidden grail, and a reminder that watchmaking’s past still holds the key to its future. The quartz crisis tends to get a bad rap. Look, I get it. When your entire livelihood—sometimes centuries in the making—is obliterated in a few short years by a tiny...

The latest caliber 7138 perpetual calendars from Audemars Piguet take a novel approach to handling cramped numerals, but the basic problem is as old as perpetual calendars themselves. One of the oldest and most intractable problems in perpetual calendar design has to do with the numerals for the date. In a traditional perpetual calendar, the...