Watches: jumping hours, a manifesto of elegance on the wrist

The passion for timepieces is sometimes just as playful as it is aesthetic. Proof of this is the return to grace of a display complication that looks great on the wrist: jumping hours . A watchmaking concept at its zenith in the 1920s and 1930s, in the middle of the Art Deco period. Imagine, instead of the banal ballet of the three hands around the center of the dial, hands that suddenly jump from 59 to 0 to mark the minutes and windows in which the hours tick by in a single leap.

“What originally attracted me to these jumping hours was their quirky design,” says Ruud Petrus Gerhardus van Rijn, collector and creator of the Jump Hour King account on Instagram, where he shares all his findings. “I like anything with a different design. These window watches are an interesting complication, and now that I’ve started making watches, I’m also interested in the complexity of their mechanism.”

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This original display…