The things watchmakers can do has always amazed me. Using tiny sprints, gears, jewels, and miscellaneous other parts watchmakers are able to make machines that keep accurate time. Most watches are fairly insignificant devices, displaying the time and date. Some watches, such as the Aeternitas Mega 4, are marvels of horology. The Mega 4 is a purely mechanical watch containing 1,483 moving parts, support for two timezones, and an impressive prepetual calendar mechanism:
The eternal calendar of the Franck Muller Watchland workshops is different from any traditional perpetual calendar in that it takes into account the rule governing the Gregorian calendar stating that all century years not divisible by 400 are common years and not leap years.
The eternal calendar follows a cycle of 1’000 years (renewable to infinity) thanks to two additional sets of wheels:
The first set of wheels, comprising a wheel of 10 years, a wheel of 100 years and a wheel of 1’000 years, allows for the display of a cycle of 1’000 years.
The second set of wheels was designed for the setting, through the use of cams, of the skipping of the leap years three times in a row every 100 years and its re-establishment the fourth time.
A feature set like this on an electronic quartz watch wouldn’t be very impressive but the fact this watch is mechanical demonstrates the sheer skill some horologists have.