There are only a few different ways you can measure time in a mechanical watch, but when it comes to showing it, the field is wide open to inventiveness and originality. Harry Winston takes full advantage of this in Opus XIII to combine all the emotions that have made the Opus Series legendary: innovation, astonishment, awe. Opus XIII once again defies the conventional rules of watchmaking. Fifty-nine pivoting minutes hands, eleven rotating triangles for the hours, and a sliding trapdoor perform a magic show where minutes and hours appear or vanish instantly — and, of course, tell the time. Minutes accumulate around a track, each five minutes in red, withdrawing in unison when they complete the circle of the hour. Silver triangles spring in turn from a faceted dome to show the hours, rotating back when their duty’s done. Every twelve hours, Harry Winston’s logo is revealed on the dial, only to vanish sixty minutes later. The fifty-nine minutes hands pivot on a ring of as many steel shafts, each held between two ruby bearings, bringing the number of jewels in the timepiece to 242. No other timepiece ever made has as many functional jewels. Each bearing has to be set and adjusted to the utmost precision — a test of the watchmaker’s dexterity and patience. The ruby ball bearings for the sliding shutter are so tiny that the package had to be opened in a non-static environment lest they fly off. Don’t expect a massive timepiece, in fact the Opus XIII looks relatively discreet, even mysterious, its inner workings covered by a facetted dome. Beneath a smoked sapphire crystal you catch a glimpse of what looks like the fan of a jet engine. This is an extraordinary component, comprising fifty-nine jumper springs — one for each minutes hand — carved from a single piece of steel using LIGA technology (lithography, electroplating and molding). The blades had to be adjusted with a file in numerous prototypes until the component could be manufactured with the exactly right tension in each spring.