Product Description
Most mechanical watches display the movement from one second to another as a smooth transition, a sweep around the dial if you will, but not the Jaeger-LeCoultre Geophysic True Second. On this one, the central seconds hand jumps precisely from one second to the next with no contemplation in between. It never deviates so it's like watching a chef slice medallions of perfectly dimensioned carrots with the same motion and the same result all day every day. There's something very austere about it, very no-nonsense, very uncompromising. In an oddly appealing way this watch keeps you honest, it feels like you just don't have any wiggle room - you're either late, early or exactly on time, at least as far as the seconds are concerned, but you are nowhere in between. It would seem a simple thing to have the seconds stop on every hashmark, but it's not, and Jaeger spent quite a bit of effort to make it so, including designing the superb in-house automatic caliber 770 from the ground up specifically for the True Second. To draw attention to just how committed Jaeger is to the True Second it gave it a special high performance balance wheel it calls the Gyrolab, which has heretofore only been seen in the Extreme LAB series - Extreme LAB being exactly as outrageous and engineered as it sounds. The True Second is the watch you imagine seeing on the wrist of a German banker in an international heist movie - if ever there was a precise countdown-to-something watch, this is it. Released along with the Universal Time in 2015 the 39.6mm steel Q8018420 extends Jaeger's re-imagining of the original 1958 Geophysic, which was a little terrier of a watch created for use by professional scientists and explorers during the International Geophysical Year. The True Second is a terrier by a different name - it's as cock sparrow in the technology department as any Geophysic past or present but the dial is clean, clean with no bric-a-brac whatsoever - just long applied hour markers, pencil hands with a thin trip of lume, and a demure date window at 3. There will be onlookers.
