Since 1875 Audemars Piguet has continued to develop and introduce new features to their range of perpetual calendar watches.
Launched in 1978 the Quantième Perpetuel by Audemars Piguet was the world’s thinest self-winding perpetual calendar watch. It was one of the greatest horological innovations of the late 1970s. The quartz crisis had hit. The luxury watch making industry was struggling to sell in a market suddenly flooded by cheaper affordable Japanese quartz watches in plentiful supply.
Did you know the watch was worked on in complete secret as it was so different from the watch world ‘normal look’ then. Looking so very much more the earlier classic "Audemars Piguet" after the company had focused on fancy dress watches for some time. Starting a new design, or look, in such difficult watch world was not seen as the brightest idea.
When the head of the technical department, plus a veteran AP watchmaker and the founder of the AP after sales department went to George Golay, the Chief executive at the time, with their new design he realised what a great idea it actually was and commissioned a run of these watches to great success.
AP produced a total of 7219 perpetual calendars over 15 years of production, with 70 different models, with approximately 200 variations - an astounding majority of these models were produced in runs of fewer than 100.
With the three recessed sub-dials showing the perpetual calendar functions plus the beautiful fourth moon phase dial at the 6 o'clock position, here at Watch Buyers we think this is a stunner of a timepiece.
This particular one shown in these images is available, at time of writing, here at Watch Buyers.
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