3 or 4 different animals

Hi Guys,

This is possibly the oldest ongoing discussion on ThePuristS (ok, alongside the discussion of in-house vs out-sourced) and there has been a lot of virtual ink spilled on the AHCI and Watchrap Forums over the years about it (some good threads can be found with some searching on the relevant terms). I can't go into too much detail as I'm tapping this out on my mobile, but here are the basic definitions of the 3 prior animals and a proposed definition for this new one.

Tourbillon: A rotating escapement which revolves about a fixed wheel and has the balance arranged coaxial with the rotating platform. Can rotate at various speeds or inclinations or be complicated by multiple axes as long as the above is maintained it is a tourbillon.

Karussel (or carousel): Bonniksen's invention is a rotating platform about a non-fixed wheel, and in his original implementations it rotated once every 52.5 minutes and the balance was not centered on the carriage. Not too many of these have been made compared to tourbillons, and none recently, so the strict guidelines for what is or is not a Karussel have not been as thoroughly debated. Most seem to agree that a rotating platform without a fixed wheel is the baseline, with variations being possible otherwise.

Carousel-tourbillon: This is where it gets contentious. WOSTEP outlined the tourbillon definition to include the coaxial balance requirement, and they call everything with a rotating platform and a fixed wheel where the balance is NOT coaxial with the platform a carousel-tourbillon. This is a bit of a catchall that arguably describes everthing from Calabrese's (prior) tourbillons to the Freak and the Swatch Diaphane One. This ambiguity is made all the more confusing by the habit within the industry to call then simply "carousels", usually pejoratively. This is largely the charge Calabrese is responding to with this latest piece.

We could simply call this latest piece a carousel and call it a day. To me though, if we're going to accept that the centralized balance is, um, central to the definition of tourbillon (something I'm generally opposed to by the way, but who am I to argue with WOSTEP?), then we are perhaps served by calling this new creation a tourbillon-carousel, to properly distinguish that it has no fixed wheel but DOES have a balance that is coaxial with the carriage.

That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it (for now).

_john