The Journe x Francis Ford Coppola “FFC” Joins The Regular Collection

Back in 2021, one of the most unusual watches F. P. Journe ever produced set an auction record at Only Watch, the biennial benefit auction devoted to raising funds for research into finding improved therapies, and eventually a cure, for muscular dystrophy. The watch was the F. P. Journe x Francis Ford Coppola “FFC Blue,” which was inspired by a conversation between the filmmaker and the watchmaker on a very specific subject – would it be possible, Coppola wanted to know, to make a watch that told the time, but using a mechanical representation of a human hand? (It is perhaps surprising it took this long for someone to come up with the idea, in retrospect – after all, watches have had “hands” for centuries, so why not use a representation of an actual hand?) The watch took seven years to develop, but, when the prototype went to Only Watch, it ended up hammering for CHF 4.5 million, breaking the then-record for a Journe watch at auction, and for a watch at auction from an independent watchmaker.

The FFC was not run-of-the-mill, to put it mildly – even for F. P. Journe, who does not exactly make run-of-the-mill watches. The base caliber for the watch is the Octa caliber 1300, but the demands made on the movement by the new display are considerable. On the dial of the watch is a mechanical hand, modeled in its design after one of the first prosthetic mechanical hands ever made (by the pioneering barber-surgeon – yes, that was a real job, once upon a time – Ambroise Paré, in the 1570s). As the hours pass, the number of extended fingers changes, and twice per day, the hand cycles through 12 distinct configurations (minutes are read off a small peripheral hand which circles the dial).

The reason that the development of the watch was so challenging is that moving the fingers – which are basically an extremely exotic form of jumping hours – requires a great deal of energy, and in order to avoid precision-disturbing changes in mainspring torque, Journe relied on a mechanism he has used extensively in other watches. This is the constant force mechanism known as a remontoir, which takes the form of a secondary mainspring, wound periodically by the primary mainspring. Normally the remontoir spring is wound at short intervals – from seconds to a few minutes – but in this case, the remontoir is armed and released once per hour, to change the positions of the fingers. The problem is complicated by the fact that a different number of hands need to move at the top of each hour – for instance, at 6:00 and 10:00, four fingers have to be withdrawn from view at the same time.

The original prototype was in tantalum but Journe has just announced that the watch will now join the regular collection (albeit in extremely small numbers) in a platinum case. The prototype’s hand and fingers were a deep blue, but the regular production model will have a hand and fingers made of titanium. Pricing was not immediately available. Find out more at fpjourne.com.