TAG Heuer grow&nbsp;carbon nanotubes to develop new watches

TAG Heuer has developed a method of creating watch hairsprings by growing them using a carbon composite material. Guy Semon, founder of the TAG Heuer Institute, said the company uses chemical vapour deposition to manufacture spirals of carbon nanotubes and amorphous carbon, taking four hours to make 300 hairsprings. Semon said the process could eliminate the need for external hairspring suppliers as well as offer TAG a sales outlet to other watchmakers.

The TAG Heuer Carrera Calibre Heuer 02T Tourbillon Nanograph, and its carbon-nanotube balance spring WIRED/TAG Heuer

“I don’t know what you’d say it is that we’re doing, but it isn’t really watchmaking,” says Guy Semon, admiring a multi-million dollar scanning electron microscope recently installed in his research facility at TAG Heuer’s Swiss headquarters.

Down a hallway, an entire room has just been readied to receive a much larger transmission electron microscope – the kind of machine that can see individual atoms. The fast-expanding facility, where every whiteboard, window and compatible surface seems scrawled upon with equations, goes under the grand title of the TAG Heuer Institute. Semon, its founder, is nevertheless low-key in his description of his latest activities there. “It’s a combination of mathematics and cooking,” he shrugs.

The former naval pilot and aeronautical engineer, 57, has been cooking up remarkable horological advancements at TAG Heuer for some years. His successes include a series of super-watches using new technologies to push ever higher oscillating frequencies – and therefore timing precision – in chronographs (up to 5/10,000ths of a second in 2012’s Mikrogirder); the development of the firm’s Connected Watch, the most significant Swiss entry into the smartwatch market thus far; and the creation of a tourbillon watch selling for under £10,000 (most tourbillons go for five times that at least).