Fortis has gone to the stratosphere and felled a tree in the name of movement developing its latest movement, the Werk 17 chronograph.
Let me back up. In our interivew with Fortis CEO Lorenz Aebischer, he hinted at some upcoming partnerships and collaborations, and here we are: Fortis has formed a partnership with the Swedish Space Corporation to aid in testing the brand’s newest movement, which is being engineered to withstand the conditions of space. Following initial development with movement manufacture La Joux Perret, Fortis sought to test the limits of thirteen prototype movements.
Fortis and the SSC met at Esrange Space Center, in Kiruna, Sweden, just shy of the Arctic Circle. The Esrange Space Center is a testing site where the SCC launches sounding rockets, studies the aurora borealis, and conducts experiments with high-altitude balloons. It was suspended from one such balloon that Fortis sent its thirteen movements to the upper stratosphere, some 30km above the earth’s surface. They stayed up there for 90 minutes, exposed to what we may call near-space conditions. And then they plummeted back to earth under a tiny parachute and landed in a tree. Which, in the good name of science and progress, was promptly felled and the movements retrieved.
Details are still a bit scarce, but this is one hell of a way to drum up excitement. Everyone loves space—or at least the idea of it as represented by the upper stratosphere. So far, we know the movement has a column wheel chronograph mechanism and 60 hours of power reserve with an automatic winding system. The copy on the Fortis site seems to suggest some novel engineering of some of the movement’s bridges, but that’s not immediately clear from the photos.
While Fortis isn’t the first brand to shoot for the stars, it does have plenty of history doing so. Fortis watches have been an official piece of kit for every Russian cosmonaut since 1994, and just last year, it released the AMADEE-20 Chronograph in collaboration with the Austrian Space Forum’s Mars Simulation mission in Israel (no to mention the AMADEE 18 we saw during our visit to the brand’s headquarters). If sending the movement 30km into the sky isn’t cool enough for you, the brand has plans in 2022 to launch the Werk 17 into actual space on an actual rocket. Until then, we expect the first models equipped with the Werk 17 to be announced this May.
You can check out the Fortis site for more info and can catch Fortis’ video below to see how they tested the movements at Esrange.
