At first glance its not very clear how to read time on this recent creation the Bell & Ross Twelve O’Clock its closer to a performance art piece that probes the more philosophical notions of time rather than a practical timepiece.
The “BR Twelve O’Clock” consists of twelve individual automatic watches, each one representing just one hour and coming in a box with battery powered winder, thereby preventing the painful inconvenience of having to reset all 12 watches should one rundown.
Like B&R’s radar watch they use three concentric discs. Each watch has one hour imprinted on it and when the concentric discs rotate the hour becomes fragmented and once they realign again the time is told for that particular hour. For example the 12 o’clock watch will realign vertically at 12 o’clock and so on, there are no minutes or seconds here and time is read to the nearest hour.
Similar to the Haldimann H8 in concept the BR Twelve O’Clock is rather an “objet d’art” or decorative piece rather than for use as a practical timekeeping device.
Global Communication Director Roberto Passariello explains about the Bell & Ross Twelve O’Clock in the video below:
