Once assembled, the watches move to the more cybernetic second floor, dedicated to testing, and boasting 46 tons of equipment. Up here, machines work around the clock. Intelligent roaming robots, nicknamed Wall-E and EVE, after Pixar’s automatons, deliver watches to various testing stations. As the wheeled duo silently race around the floor, trays of watches between their ‘forearms’, they nimbly avoid bumping into people or objects.
With typical Swiss seriousness, Tudor has avoided over anthropomorphising these droids, but thoughts of Short Circuit’s genial Johnny 5 are never far from a visitor’s mind. By day they share the space with human colleagues, but at night the robots have the run of the floor, barring a sole maintenance person.
While all movements undergo the brand’s standard testing (TPC, for Tudor performance control), a select group of high-performance watches also undergoes Metas Master Chronometer testing. Developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology in collaboration with Omega in 2015, this is considered the most rigorous test in the industry.
The Metas process begins with accuracy testing to ensure the watch’s precision remains stable over time. This is carried out at two temperatures and six positions (dial upward, dial downward, crown to the right, crown to the left, crown upward, crown downward) both at full wind and at 33 per cent power reserve. Throughout this, the watch must maintain accuracy of between 0 and +5 seconds per day. To put this into context, Tudor’s standard tolerances are -2 to +4, while the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute allows deviations of -4 to +6 seconds per day.