RM 056 Tourbillon Sapphire

With the RM 056 Tourbillon Chronograph Sapphire, presented in 2012 and tied to Formula 1 driver Felipe Massa, Richard Mille pushes its own materials research to its extreme consequences: the entire case — front bezel, middle case and rear bezel — is milled from solid blocks of synthetic sapphire, a material already used in watchmaking for crystals but never before, until that point, employed to build the entire external structure of a produced timepiece, however extremely limited the series. Machining the case alone requires over 1,000 hours of milling, while the hand-wound caliber RM056 integrates a tourbillon, split-seconds chronograph, 30-minute totalizer, power reserve and function and torque indicators. Produced in just 5 pieces, the model still maintains water resistance of 50 meters, no small technical achievement for a fully transparent case.

The line continues with the RM 56-01 Tourbillon Sapphire, a conceptually more streamlined version (without the chronograph complication) that consolidates the principle of a pure sapphire case, and reaches its most sophisticated point in 2014 with the RM 56-02: here the movement plate, made of grade 5 titanium, is no longer fixed directly to the case but remains suspended inside it by a specially developed braided cable, managed by a pulley system with a tension indicator — a solution that explicitly revisits the cable architecture already introduced on the RM 27-01 line with Rafael Nadal. The movement's bridges, too, including the barrel bridge and the tourbillon bridge, are made of sapphire, extending the watch's transparency beyond the case alone. Produced in 10 pieces, the RM 56-02 requires, in addition to roughly 40 days of continuous milling for the case, another 400 hours of finishing for each movement bridge.

Beyond the exceptional nature of the production numbers — just 5 and 10 pieces for the versions mentioned — the RM 056/56 line has carried a weight well beyond its own production run: it demonstrated that an entirely sapphire case could be made, rendered waterproof and wearable, opening the way to a broader use of the material on other references of the brand and becoming a reference often cited, in the specialized press, among the most significant innovations in watchmaking of the last fifteen years.