Complications: The Jumping Hour

When thinking about the most desirable and useful complications, the jumping hour (also known as a jump hour) isn’t normally at the forefront of people’s minds. Whether this is due to it not adding any extra functionality or more owing to the relative scarcity of affordable mechanical jumping hour watches is difficult to say. But it is the complication that has always piqued my interest.

As a brief introduction, a jumping hour watch is one that does not feature a traditional hour hand that sweeps the dial once every 12 (or 24) hours, but instead has a disc viewed through an aperture on the dial that jumps to display the next hour precisely as the minute hand reaches 60 minutes. The correlation between the earth’s rotation during a day and an hour hand slowly arcing round the dial sits well with our common model of displaying time, but a jumping hour watch plays on the way mankind has broken up the day into discrete hour chunks. The inclusion of an hour hand in continuous motion gives an easy visual representation of the relative position between the previous hour and the next one, whereas the jump hour aperture gives an explicit bookend between the end of one hour and the start of another. The combination of digital and analog displays can take some getting used to.

Solving these kinds of problems is usually the playground of high-end watchmakers—who often revel in doing such things just to show they can—which goes some way to explaining the limited choice for jumping hour watches if your pockets aren’t all that deep. Some of my favorite high-end watches happen to be ones that are simultaneously among the hardest and easiest to read.

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Meistersinger also use the same JJ01 movement in their Salthora line, and currently take a more casual design approach with the Meta Transparent. As skeleton dials go it’s pretty well done and an interesting thing to watch.  The transparent dial reveals the 12-pointed star that jumps 30 degrees moving the hour dial to the next number, and the actuating lever and position spring which engage as the watch ticks towards 60 minutes. The thickness is again 13mm, but a larger case of 43mm will help the watch to feel more in proportion. The price is around $3,675.

Also from Meistersinger, for a slightly different take on this concept there’s the Salthora Meta X, a diver-inspired Jump Hour unveiled at Baselworld earlier this year.

Another brand who have dabbled in the jumping hour game by using an ETA 2824-2 base with Dubois-Depraz module is Fortis. The F-43 jumping hour reverses the combination of fixed aperture and moving hour disc by keeping a fixed hour track positioned beneath a jumping dial and aperture, echoing Vacheron’s wandering hours clocks from 300 years earlier.

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The Oris Artelier Jumping Hour (read our review here) makes use of the Sellita SW300-1 as its base, which is a millimeter thinner than the SW200-1 or its ETA equivalent.

The Art Deco styling of the Artelier line works really well with the jump hour complication, and the 40.5mm diameter and 11.3mm thickness mean this is probably the easiest of the bunch to live with, though it comes at a higher price than the Christopher Ward and similar to that of the Meistersinger.

Whereas many complications can be done very well at nearly all price points, the jumping hour remains one that is under-represented in the sub-$5,000 range.  Some of the watches above show how well brands have been able to design an attractive and well thought out jumping hour watch. If the thickness was reduced by adding a jumping hour module to a thinner hand wound caliber, such as the ETA 2804 or Sellita SW215, then they could yet prove more popular yet again leading to greater choice in the market. I for one would welcome a comeback.