Don't worry: we've all been there, brother. So you've found a spare 25 million nestled in the pocket of some forgotten skinny jeans, and now you're torn on how to spend it. That time it went for $24 million, which at the time was a little north of £15 million, and set a new mark for any timepiece. This one has broken records twice at auction: first in December 1999, when it sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $9 million to Sheikh Saud bin Muhammad Al Thani of the Qatari royal family and again when it was sold after his death in November 2014. He considered throwing it straight into a lake on his property, but his daughter managed to dissuade him. Having spent $15,000 on his watch at the height of the Great Depression, Graves had an attack of nerves – had he accidentally put himself in terrible danger? People would do terrible things to get hold of his watch. Commissioned in 1925 and finally delivered to banker and watch collector Henry Graves to exactly that end, this one-off piece packs in 430 screws, 110 wheels and 70 jewels among its 920 individual parts. Patek Phillipe bills this as the most complicated watch ever made without the help of computer design and manufacture. ‘Supercomplication’ is not an exaggeration. Because that doesn't really count, does it? Have a look below: For the sake of fairness, we've left out the models that are caked in bazillions of diamonds. With the vintage watch market booming, this is where you'll find your expensive watch record-breakers, the timepieces that go for as much as a decent Premier League midfielder. But when you want people to know that you've spent the GDP of a Pacific island on your watch, sometimes the best way is to make it glittery.Īnd then, a notch above both, you've got your one-offs – watches owned by famous people, or long-dead people, or, counterintuitively, the watches were made slightly wrong and are, therefore, completely unique (read: collectable). On the other side, you've got watches that are expensive because they're made from expensive stuff – precious metals, hand-cut diamonds, bits of meteorites. This is where you'll find the flagship watches by your Swiss old-guard (and the odd disruptive new brand), which use nothing more than cogs and gears to track the movement of the planets, or chime like Big Ben. On the traditional side, you've got six- and sometimes seven-figure timepieces that earn their price tag by squeezing incomprehensibly complicated engineering into teeny tiny cases. The most expensive watches on earth, then, tend to fall into one of two camps. Which makes it all feel a bit more justifiable than dropping more than most mortgages on a ring with a big diamond on. But like an Italian sports car, your outlay also buys you precision engineering and decades of heritage. The best watches do, of course, look very pretty. Instead, they're more like functional jewellery, a way for men to buy themselves something fancy but also know that what they've purchased does more than just look pretty. Or rather, they're not just about telling the time. But a these days, watches aren't really about telling the time. Considering that everyone has the exact time, in every timezone on earth, in their pocket at all times, a mechanical watch that costs more than a house can seem like a curious investment.
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