Luxury Insider

Without doubt one of the world's greatest living watchmakers, Paul Gerber has over the years built up a reputation for immense mechanical ingenuity, and is now revered in horological circles. Born in Bern, Gerber was trained by his father, himself a watchmaker, but opened up his own business in the early 1990s in Zürich. From this atelier, he now makes and sells his own signature line of watches.

His illustrious career spans 3 decades. He first garnered attention by creating the world's smallest clock with a wooden movement, which was entered in the Guinness Book of Records in 1989. This remarkable sense of intricate miniaturization and technical prowess has helped him to continually develop movements and complications for other manufacturers.

The Retro Twin

MIH Watch of 2005

His other accolades include combining a mechanical alarm with an automatic chronograph movement without altering its height for Fortis, as well as a wristwatch with a retrograde seconds and two synchronous moving rotors (the ‘Retro Twin’) – all world firsts.

His most recent collaborative effort was in the construction of the Musée International d'Horlogerie (MIH) watch of 2005, whose annual calendar movement is comprised of, amazingly, just 9 parts. Gerber is particularly fond of this watch, and wears it frequently, and considering the watch’s robustness and the brilliant simplicity of its engineering, it’s not hard to see why.

Making The World’s Most Complicated Wristwatch

Gerber’s finest hour was undoubtedly when he was asked by a private collector in the early 1990s to co-create what was at one time the world's most complicated wristwatch. Starting from a privately-commissioned one-off timepiece co-developed by a then-unknown Franck Muller and based on a legendary Louis-Elysee Piguet movement of 1892, the watch proved to be a spectacular showcase of Gerber’s watchmaking ingenuity.

Overcoming mind-boggling mechanical challenges, Paul Gerber managed to add a flying tourbillon (the world’s smallest), a split-seconds flyback chronograph and two power-reserve indicators for both the main movement as well as the chiming mechanisms. What was remarkable was that these additions were made to what was already then the world’s most complicated watch, he did this without increasing the diameter of the movement, and he had absolutely no room for error, given the rarity of the base movement. Gerber as mechanical genius? You bet.

Gerber's philosophy isn't easy to quantify, but you get the feeling from his meticulous work that he is a man of focus. He says his watches have no unifying theme, which is believable judged on aesthetic value alone, but look closer at his creations and you notice in all of them impressive mechanical innovations, such as in his Retro-Twin watch, or in his miniature interpretation of the “flying” tourbillon movement.