In 1989 the architect and designer John C. Ermel, working on an order for a new watch design, had the idea of making the difference between the cycles of day and night obvious.
This could be achieved by using a radially adjustable hour hand. He arranged the scale of hours on a so-called “Pascal’s spiral”, a conchoid of a circle, a special cycloid achieved by overlapping the usual clockwise rotation with translation in the radial direction – in this case a sine curve with a cycle of 24 hours. The mechanism necessary for controlling such an hour hand took more than 10 years to develop and is a real marvel of Swiss watchmaking craftsmanship. In 1999 John C. Ermel applied for a Swiss patent on his idea and in 2000 for a worldwide patent. Cyclos watches are the result of all his hard work. Visit the Cyclos website at www.cyclos-watch.ch to see an animation of how this amazing watch works.
Made in Dornach, Switzerland
