Floating or flying? The mysteries of the second hand of the Seconde Française collection

The latest collection launched by Beaubleu, the “Seconde Française” is a series of six models produced in a limited edition of 888 copies for each model, celebrating the French art of living.

The French style of life that we both love and hate. This art of living that evokes freedom and lively debates, good manners and gastronomy, café terraces, a strong taste for detail, romanticism or even a young woman so elegant and relaxed at the same time… Beaubleu's "Seconde Française" highlights the timelessness of this very parisian philosophy between tradition and modernity but always punctuated by a subtle dose of impertinence. 

"Seconde Française" : Unit of time specific to the French lifestyle. Light, mysterious and approximate, it illustrates a certain taste of the moment, a bit casual.

Through each collection, Beaubleu explores and questions a facet of the notion of time, both from a conceptual and design point of view. Seconde Française focuses on the "second", the least questioned and certainly the least considered unit of time. Useful in cooking and baking, in the world of sport, or even used to count down the passage to a new year, is it today a reference point in the daily life of ordinary mortals? Well no, it is not a question for anyone to organize themselves and count their time "to the second". Never!

Although so elusive, the second is nevertheless a marker of time passing and flowing in its own right. This is why Beaubleu sought to restore its nobility and put it in the spotlight by removing all its pragmatism. How? By suspending it in time and in the watch through a flying seconds hand, a second hand – round, of course – which evolves as if by magic in weightlessness and seems to float above the dial of each of the models in the collection.

This so-called flying or floating second is set on the central axis of a transparent support, itself positioned above the dial. It is this disc, on which the hand is fixed, which turns. And it is the absence of reflection and the total transparency of this one gives the impression that the second hand is floating in the void.

Technically, the Beaubleu teams had to face various issues to create and bring this second to life. First of all, the famous support on which the hand rests had to be completely transparent and devoid of any reflection in order to give this impression of floating to the hand. The idea is not to make it disappear, but to make it invisible to the naked eye.

Then comes the glass. Fully curved, and even doubly curved, that is to say with distinct curves on the inside and outside. The goal? To "distort" what can be seen with the naked eye and avoid any reflection of light at the start of the glass, on its edge. It is thanks to this double curvature that the eye is then unable to clearly identify the disc of the seconds hand. 

But the constraints did not stop there with this floating second. It was also necessary to find the perfect balance between the weight of the seconds hand on the one hand and the thickness and diameter of the disc on which it rests so that it could turn smoothly and naturally, without any jolts.