How Patek Philippe became the most celebrated watchmaker in the world

The watch trade was not Antoni Norbert de Patek's first choice of career The ultimate evolution of the plutocratic pocket watch was the fabled Henry Graves Super Complication, delivered in the 1930s to a New York banker who would have been forgotten by history had he not splashed out on a watch that last changed hands in November 2014 for 23,237,000 SFr.Ironically, at the time the Graves - arguably the Mona Lisa of portable timepieces - was being built, Patek Philippe almost went bust To celebrate the firm's 150th anniversary in 1989 he launched the Calibre 89, a pocket watch of the sort that would have been familiar to the plutocrats of America's Gilded Age.

The watch industry had just weathered the potential extinction level event of the "Quartz crisis" of the late 1970s and 1980s when battery powered watches looked like they would polish off clock work; Philippe Stern gambled that mechanical watches would survive and thrive and the Calibre 89 was to herald a new golden age of mechanical watchmaking that has endured Philippe Stern's legacy includes the world-class Patek Philippe museum in Geneva and the relocation of the manufacturing facilities from various workshops scattered around Geneva to a campus at Plan Les Ouates, a move subsequently endorsed by the arrival of numerous watch brands including Piaget and Vacheron Constantin Today the brand is overseen by Thierry Stern and in November 2019 his signature grand complication, the Grandmaster Chime, became the most expensive watch ever sold at auction when it fetched 31,000,000 SFrUntil that returns to the market, here are three Patek Philippe watches worth investing in.

Now readPatek Philippe's first new watch of 2020 is a limited-edition Calatrava. . Source