Appreciation of "jumping hour" watches that display time as linear

On the Watchismo blog, Mitch celebrates the launch of the Urwerk King Cobra CC1, a remake of the original "jumping hour" watch, explaining why he's so fascinated with these remarkable, largely extinct timepieces.


Time is usually – nearly always – displayed by a circular indication: one dial and two (or three) with the time displayed around a perpetual circle. However, this 360° representation of time goes against everything we learnt as we grew up drawing a straight line on a blank page and marking it Past, Present and Future. Why do we think of time as travelling in a straight line yet display it rotating around a circle? The answer is straightforward: mechanisms that continually rotate are much simpler to produce than those that trace a straight line then return to zero. In fact, the latter is so difficult that, until now, nobody has ever managed to develop a production wristwatch with true retrograde linear displays.

Urwerk King Cobra CC1 Reintrepretation of 1958 Patek Philippe Cobra Prototype Linear Retrograde Cylinder Jumping Hour Watch