The Patek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication is one of the most complicated pocket watches ever created. The 18-karat gold watch has 24 complications and assembled by Patek Philippe. It was named after banker Henry Graves Jr who commissioned it out of his desire to outdo the Grande Complication pocket watch of American automaker James Ward Packard. The two were both at the top of the watch collecting world, regularly commissioning innovative new timepieces.
The timepiece contains 920 individual parts, with 430 screws, 110 wheels, 120 removable parts, and 70 jewels, all of them handcrafted on a tiny scale. The timepiece is a gold, double dialled and double openfaced, minute repeating clock watch with Westminster chimes, grande and petite sonnerie, split seconds chronograph, registers for 60-minutes and 12-hours, perpetual calendar accurate to the year 2100, moon-phases, equation of time, dual power reserve for striking and going trains, mean and sidereal time, central alarm, indications for times of sunrise/sunset and a celestial chart for the night time sky of New York City at 40 degrees 41.0 minutes North latitude. Its diameter is 74mm thickness of case with glass 36mm; and weight of case 536g.
It took 3 years to design, and another 5 years to manufacture the watch, which was delivered to Henry Graves on January 19, 1933. The Supercomplication was the world’s most complicated mechanical timepiece for more than fifty years, with a total of 24 different functions. The record was bested in 1989 when Patek Philippe released the Patek Philippe Calibre 89, but the Supercomplication remains the most complicated mechanical watch built without assistance of computers.
On July 10, 2014, Sotheby’s announced that in November 2014, the pocket watch would once again be auctioned. On November 11, 2014, the watch was sold in Geneva, Switzerland. The final price, reached 23,237,000 Swiss Francs, equivalent to USD $24 million at the time. The sum was the highest price that anyone has ever paid for a timepiece, including both pocket watches and wrist watches.