Watch brands can't resist the lure of a mystery dial

'We hardly ever use the second hand on a watch unless we’re counting down for New Year's Eve,' jokes Nicolas Ducoudert, car interior designer turned founder of French independent watch brand Beaubleu. 'It’s almost useless, but it does give you a sense of time passing, and that’s what I wanted to play with, more expressively. I wanted the second hand to offer a kind of experience.'

Beaubleu’s signature design element is that each hand is comprised of a circular form, including the second hand. But with its Second Francaise model the second hand – or circle – appears to move around the dial as though disconnected from anything on it; it’s not, as hands on more conventional watches are, affixed to a central pinion.

It’s what’s known in the watch business as a mystery dial – a watch display that doesn’t make it exactly clear how the hands are driven. Launching later this year is Beaubleu’s La Piece, a second mystery model, with a one-piece dial stamped from brass by the Monnaie de Paris, France’s oldest institution, government-owned and responsible for minting French Euro coins. It’s the first watch dial it has been involved in creating.

"Mystery dial watches tend to be very expensive for the simple reason that they’re a nightmare to make, and it took us 21 prototypes to get the right combination of the various factors,” notes Ducoudert. That involves, in this instance, stacking a transparent disc over the dial, the rotation of which gives the illusion of a floating seconds display. Weight is also a factor: this seconds disc – historically made from sapphire crystal or acrylic - needs to be light enough to be rotated by the power available from the mechanical movement. The fit and finishing of the components is also critical in order to maintain the illusion. Beaubleu’s models use a specially shaped glass, the refractive quality of which further helps hide the trick.

'These mystery dial watches are less about accuracy [in the sense that it’s hard to tell where the seconds circle is indicating precisely] and more about perception,' Ducoudert argues. 'There’s a lyricism to a mystery dial.'

The concept of the mystery dial is said to belong to the watchmaker Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, who completed his first mystery clock in 1839 (also a keen magician, he’d use it in his shows, and would lend his surname to the legendary Houdini). But it was Cartier – with its Model A clock – that made the idea popular, introducing the use of transparent discs, one it would later apply to pocket watches. It was in the 1940s that the mystery dial wristwatch really took off, with other makers, from Benrus to LeCoultre, exploring multiple other methods to the same entertaining effect: Vacheron Constantin, for example, simply hid the centre of the dial to reveal only the tips of each hand.

Come the 1970s Zodiac applied the use of transparent discs to a wristwatch, the Astrographic, launched in 1969 – when the avant-garde nature of the display was thought to chime well with the technological revolution embodied by the first moon landing – and revived as a limited edition to mark its 50th anniversary in 2019. Longines’ Comet, released the year after, used two concentric rotating discs, one for minutes, one for hours.

More recently, in 2019 Maurice Lacroix’s bonkers Mysterious Seconds came with a wandering seconds hand, while last year Frank Muller launched its Round Triple Mystery - its third in a series of mystery dial watches, using a dial with concentric wheels and triangular hands - and Timex reissued its 1975 ‘mystery dial lite’ Enigma. The latter uses broad hands colour-matched to the dial behind to achieve a similar effect to a true mystery dial, in part to keep the price down, in part, being a quartz model, to keep the energy cost down too.

'The appearance of an element floating in space presents time in a particularly graphic way,' enthuses Giorgio Gallo, global creative director of the Timex Group, which has further mystery dial watches in the pipeline, potentially including a mechanical model that would allow for the full transparent disc approach to the display. 'Even if the idea is part of watch history it still looks very modern. It’s something different from the usual while still being analogue. There’s a magical effect to it.'

t’s one that is easy to understand when it’s explained. But then perhaps that is to spoil the mystery. As Nicolas Ducoudert says, 'We have customers who come to us and ask ‘how does it work?’ and then stop themselves. ‘You know what, don’t tell me,’ they say.'