The Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega4 Part2

But beyond all that, the Aeternitas Mega 4 is a tribute to every human being who has attempted to refine our concept of time, reaching back to the ancient Egyptians who first defined the concept of the year by observing the earth’s orbit around the sun, as well as the concept of the month by identifying the lunar cycle.

That this watch came into existence at all is thanks to three men and their extraordinary courage and incendiary vision. The first is Franck Muller, the maverick watchmaker genius who resuscitated and revived the watch industry by bringing new relevance to the world of high complications by injecting dynamic neoclassical energy and Art Deco design into them.

The second is his partner, Vartan Sirmakes, the brilliant industrialist who single-handedly created the vast in-house capabilities of Franck Muller Watchland to manifest the perfect breeding ground for the world’s most complicated timepieces to be born and serviced for perpetuity. That Franck Muller Watchland produces almost every single component for its own watches, including watchcases and dials, gives it the incredible flexibility for prototyping that is instrumental to reaching for the horological stars.

Finally, the Aeternitas Mega 4 is the work of the incredible Pierre-Michel Golay, the Swiss watch industry’s greatest unsung hero. He is, to this day, the first contemporary watchmaker to succeed in creating a serially produced grande et petite sonnerie wristwatch, and the undisputed first to add to this the profoundly difficult Westminster Chimes, which necessitated two more gongs and two more hammers; he was also the first to combine this already amazing complication with a tourbillon — all during his 27 years at Gérald Genta. While at Genta, he also single-handedly revived the art of the ultra-flat perpetual calendar and the ultra-flat minute repeater.

To this day, Golay remains one of only five men capable of creating a grande et petite sonnerie (the others being Philippe Dufour, François-Paul Journe, David Candaux and Giulio Papi) from scratch, and one of only two able to make a Westminster Chimes sonnerie.

He is the only man able to make an automatic sonnerie, as well as the only man who has ever placed a tourbillon on the dial-side of a grande sonnerie. Finally, Golay is also the only man who has combined a split-seconds chronograph and a grande sonnerie in one integrated movement,and the only man to have ever created a perpetual calendar accurate to 1,000 years and beyond.

But who would have known that it was only in the seventh decade of his life, at his new home at Franck Muller, that he would achieve his most magnificent opus yet — a summation of all the skills he possessed and all the reverence for the horological arts within his soul?