Fifteen years of pure JJ01
Our former master watchmaker Johannes Jahnke isn’t the sort of person who goes out of his way to attract attention. He doesn’t drive a flash car. And his hobbies include fixing old washing machines.
But looks can be deceiving, because Johannes – originally from Dresden, in Saxony’s watchmaking heartland – is the mind behind the ‘JJ calibres’: a family of in-house movements with modular complications that have powered some of our most advanced watches.
These are the timepieces that lead us to the new C1 Jump Hour XV Limited Edition – a 15th-anniversary reimagining of 2011’s C9 Harrison Jumping Hour, the first home for our JJ01 Jump Hour movement.
In the years since, JJ01 has been refined and improved, first by Johannes, and now by our current technical director, Frank Stelzer – the watchmaker behind the calibre FS01, the movement used to power our award-winning chiming watch, the C1 Bel Canto.
Now it returns for a 15 year celebration as the heart of the Jump Hour XV, a limited edition of 300. Torque is gathered across the full hour and released at once, so the disc in the aperture jumps as the hand crosses the hour.
As with the original C9 Harrison Jumping Hour, there’s a numeral hour window at 12, but now it’s crisp white rather than silver, and boasts a sleeker, more legible Roman font, too. The Light-catcher™ case is a compact 39mm, and crafted in brushed-and-polished marine-grade stainless steel.
Everything has been subtly improved: a cleaner rhodium-silver ‘spider’s web’ guilloché, no mid-dial name plaque; a multi-faceted minute hand in blue PVD rather than black; and an anti-reflective box-sapphire crystal.
We’ve taken everything we’ve learned over the last 15 years – from finishing to design to engineering – and applied that to a watch that pays respect to the past, but looks confidently to the future.
The C1 Jump Hour XV Limited Edition. It’s where we started, but it’s also where we’re going.
Calibre JJ01
Calibre JJ01
An instant, precisely timed jump hour had long frustrated Johannes Jahnke. On most jump hour watches the disc does not snap over exactly as the minute hand reaches the hour – and the surge of energy required for the jump often throws the movement’s rate off as well. Instead of storing and dumping power in the last minutes, in JJ01 the module gathers energy evenly across the full hour, then releases it in a single, clean jump. Peter Ellis, CW co-founder, says: “The clever thing about Johannes is the way he comes up with insightful, and often not very complicated, solutions to difficult problems.”
If you want to see how he thought it through, this 2011 interview with Johannes is still the best window into his mind.
Dedicated to detail
When it comes to the C1 Jump Hour XV, fifteen years of refinement is in every detail.
