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H. Moser’s new $440,000 watch chimes the time out loud, and lets you watch it happen

The chiming feature is one of watchmaking's rarest tricks, and Moser flipped it around so you can see it work.

Wristwatch, Arm, Body Part
H. Moser & Cie. / H. Moser & Cie.

H. Moser & Cie., the Neuhausen-based Swiss watchmaker, has released the Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain — a $440,000 flex limited to 20 examples.

The Real Big Deal here is the chiming. This watch has a minute repeater: a complication that, on demand, rings out the time on tiny hammers striking some gong. It’s hours, quarters, and minutes, in sound.

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It’s one of the oldest and most difficult things a watchmaker can build. The first minute-repeating wristwatch dates to 1892, back when chiming the time aloud was genuinely useful — a way to check the hour in the dark before electric light was on every nightstand.

On almost every repeater ever made, that machinery lives hidden beneath the movement. Moser re-engineered the entire architecture to move the hammers and gongs to the dial side, so you watch the mechanism strike as you hear it.

Pulling that off meant rebuilding the movement’s layout while keeping the acoustic performance up to par, according to the brand.

There’s even more stacked on top. The watch carries a one-minute flying tourbillon at 6 o’clock, fitted with a hand-formed cylindrical hairspring — a construction borrowed from 18th-century marine chronometers that’s rarely attempted today because of how hard it is to make and regulate.

The dial is fully skeletonized, exposing the three-dimensional HMC 909 hand-wound caliber: 415 components, 35 jewels, a 90-hour power reserve, and Moser’s double-stripe finishing across the plate and bridges.

The one flash of color comes from the “Cosmic Rain” sub-dial at 2 o’clock, a domed piece of aventurine with a fumé finish and hand-applied mother-of-pearl inlays meant to read like a star field.

It all sits in a 40mm titanium case, 14.4mm thick, on a hand-stitched grey alligator strap.

Why the chime in the front matters

The minute repeater sits in horology’s top tier, one of the traditional grand complications— alongside the tourbillon and the perpetual calendar — that separates serious watchmaking from everything else.

For most of its history, the repeater has been a thing you hear but never see. Press the slide, and the watch chimes the hours, quarters, and minutes on hidden gongs, with the mechanism doing the work buried out of sight.

Flipping it to the front turns an audio complication into a visual one, letting the racks, hammers, and gongs perform in the open. That’s the kind of move Moser has built its modern reputation on: taking centuries-old haute horlogerie and reframing it so the machinery becomes the show.

It helps that Moser is a small, independent house, producing around 4,000 watches a year and developing its own calibers in-house. There’s no mass-market line to answer to, which is part of why a 20-piece, near-half-million-dollar experiment like this one can exist at all.

Where to Buy It

The Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain runs $440,000 and is limited to 20 pieces, available through H. Moser & Cie. boutiques and authorized dealers. At that price and that scarcity, this is far more likely to reach collectors and display cases than wrists — but that’s sometimes the point of a piece like this.

Andy Vasoyan is a Chicago-based writer and audio editor. He has been fortunate to visit distilleries and breweries across the… Read Full Bio
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