Atmos JAEGER-LECOULTRE watch, No. 635843.
Bronze and glass.
Signed.
Measurements: 22 x 20 x 20 x 15 cm.
The Atmos table clock by the Swiss firm Jaeger-LeCoultre is a luxury piece of extraordinary precision and quality. Its open structure invites you to study its mechanism to understand its secret. Made of bronze, it has a round white dial with a bronze profile, Breguet hands and Roman numerals. The special feature of this watch is that it works by drawing energy from changes in ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure, so that it can run for years without human intervention. Its energy source is a hermetically sealed capsule containing a mixture of chloroethane gas and liquid, which expands in an expansion chamber when the temperature rises, compressing a coiled spring. When the temperature drops, the gas condenses and the spring decompresses. This constant motion coils the mainspring. A single degree of temperature variation (in the range of 15 to 30°C) or a pressure variation of 3 mmHg is enough to keep the watch operational for two days. The low added energy needed for its operation requires the mechanism to work with as little friction as possible, hence the use of a torsion pendulum as a regulating mechanism, which consumes less energy than the ordinary pendulum, since it oscillates only twice a minute (1/60th of the number of oscillations of a conventional pendulum clock).