Quadruple Tourbillon

The Quadruple Tourbillon was born of the same obsession that drove the Double Tourbillon 30°: making the tourbillon, invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1801 for pocket watches that were essentially stationary, genuinely effective on a wristwatch in constant motion. The mechanism was patented by Greubel Forsey in 2004 and presented to the public in 2005, reaching the market a few years later in a first execution in red gold in 2009: from the outset it was described as one of the most complex mechanical architectures ever built into a series-produced wristwatch.

The underlying idea is to push the principle of cross-compensation to its extreme: instead of a single tourbillon, or two cages as in the Double Tourbillon 30°, the caliber employs four tourbillons arranged in two pairs, each enclosed in its own double system of tilted cages. The two pairs are then linked to each other by a spherical differential, a gear that averages the mean speed of the two tourbillon pairs exactly as an automotive differential averages the rotation of a car's wheels: the result is a rate accuracy averaged across a far wider range of positional combinations than any single or double tourbillon.

Over the years the line has been offered in platinum and in all-black versions, as well as the 2018 Quadruple Tourbillon Blue variant with a polished blue gold dial, and it has given rise to a direct lineage of more recent models such as the GMT Quadruple Tourbillon, which combines the same four cages with a second time zone featuring a rotating globe — confirmation of how central this invention has remained to the manufacture's technical language even years after its debut.