Réglage
The bare movement is regulated in six positions over ten days. Nothing else happens to it until it holds within two seconds either way.
Maison Meridian · Genève
Perpétuel 39
A thirty-nine millimetre chronometer with a five-day reserve, made to order in six metals. Turn it. Take it apart. Then build your own.
- Diameter
- 39.0 mm
- Reserve
- 120 h
- Frequency
- 28 800 A/H
- Production
- 250 / year
Scroll
We do not make many watches. We make the same watch, carefully, for a very long time.
The register
Three ways to begin
Every Perpétuel leaves Genève configured to order. These three are the ones the atelier builds most often — take one as it stands, or open it in the composer and change your mind.
Anatomy
Nine parts, in
the order they meet
Assembled, it is one object. Keep scrolling and it comes apart in the order a watchmaker would take it — crystal first, caseback last.
Calibre MR-01
Two hundred
and fourteen parts
Turn it over. The movement is finished on surfaces that will never be seen again once the caseback is screwed down — perlage on the plate, chamfers polished by hand against a boxwood stick, screw heads blacked and their slots aligned.
- Components
- 214
- Jewels
- 32
- Frequency
- 28 800 A/H
- Reserve
- 120 h
- Tolerance
- −2 / +2 s per day
- Assembly
- 1 watchmaker
Assembly
Five benches,
one watchmaker
Anglage
Every bridge edge is filed to a forty-five degree chamfer and polished against boxwood. Two hundred and eleven millimetres of edge per movement.
Emboîtage
Movement into case, under a laminar hood. The dial goes on last and is never touched again by anything but a cloth.
Étanchéité
Dry pressure first, then water. A piece that weeps is opened, dried for a week, and begun again from station three.
Registre
The reference, the movement number and the owner's name are entered by hand in the register. That book has never been digitised.
Precision
Eight beats
a second
The balance swings four times a second, and the escapement releases the train twice per swing. That stutter is the seconds hand you are watching — not a sweep, but two hundred and eighty-eight thousand separate decisions an hour.
Beats since you arrived
0
Rate
4 Hz · 28 800 A/H
The dial
Six hours on a
rose engine
A guilloché dial is cut, not printed. The blank turns against a fixed graver on a lathe older than the maison, and the pattern is whatever the cams and the operator's hands agree on that morning. Choose one and watch it change.
Materials
Three substances,
chosen slowly
A watch is an argument about materials. These are the three the maison will not substitute — hover any of them to look closer.
Three photographs, and everything else on this page — the watch you have been turning, its dials, its bracelet, the campaign stills on the collection cards — drawn at runtime by the same code that dresses it.
The register
A hundred and
twenty-two years
- 1904Édouard Roche opens a two-bench workshop on the Rue de la Corraterie and begins signing pocket movements for other houses.
- 1937The first wristwatch under the maison's own name. Thirty-nine millimetres, because that was the diameter of the movement he already had.
- 1968Meridian declines to convert to quartz. Production falls to eleven pieces in a year and the register is kept by hand throughout.
- 1994The rose engine is recommissioned. Guilloché returns to the catalogue after twenty-six years.
- 2026Calibre MR-01. Two hundred and fifty pieces a year, and the same thirty-nine millimetres.
Nocturne
What it does
when you are asleep
Nine hours of daylight charge the markers. They give it back over the night, dimming as they go, and are still legible at four in the morning when you have no reason to look.
- Compound
- Grade X1 · green emission
- Charge
- 100%
- Legible for
- 8 h
Written elsewhere
On the record
The Perpétuel does the rarest thing a modern watch can do: it declines to be interesting, and is therefore fascinating.
Two hundred and fifty a year, and a waiting list measured in seasons. Meridian has understood that scarcity is a manufacturing decision, not a marketing one.
I have owned it for four years. I have had it serviced once. I have never once thought about it, which is the entire point.
Boutiques
Four rooms,
by appointment
There is no online checkout. A Perpétuel is handed over in person, sized on the wrist, and entered in the register under your name. Tell us where you are and we will find the nearest hour.
Begin a composition- Genève12 Rue de la Corraterie
- LondonBurlington Arcade, W1J
- TokyoGinza 4-chōme
- New York57th & Madison