The Finest Watches

IWC Da Vinci Watches

Some 558 years ago, a small village in Tuscany saw the birth of a man without whose genius today’s world would be a different place: Leonardo da Vinci. In the 67 years until his death on 2 May 1519, he dreamed up more inventions and machines, and discovered and documented more of the laws of nature than hundreds of his contemporaries and those after them put together. His lifelong passion was the precise measurement of time. Countless sketches testify to his enthusiasm for the earliest clockworks of the Renaissance. All his groundbreaking inventions, such as gear drives, bevel gears and complicated screw transmission systems, can be found in many machines today, including watches. His work on space-saving spring drives and new escapements, in particular, was pivotal. Posterity is still in awe of the some 6,000 pages of manuscript which he left behind. In the late 1960s, Leonardo da Vinci’s revolutionary way of thinking inspired IWC to introduce a watch named after him. Even that very first Da Vinci model surprised watch lovers with a special quality that has remained typical of the family to this day: that of always being a little ahead of its time. Many trailblazing innovations from IWC have first been developed for use in a Da Vinci, including the revolutionary Beta 21 series quartz movement for wristwatches, unveiled in 1969 as a joint effort by the Swiss watchmaking industry: a quantum leap in IWC’s history of precision measurement.

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