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But What Does That Big Button Do?

written by A.Morgan - 12th Dec 2011

What is it about a button that is just so irresistible?

Reading the press release for the Richard Mille RM037, I skim through words like ‘oversize,’ ‘Alcryn’ and ‘O-ring,’ but all I want to do is find out what that big, gold, shiny button does. There is no obvious chronograph or any kind of extra complication at all, so the mysterious button becomes all the more intriguing.

It so turns out that there isn’t just one button; there are in fact two. It’s something that’s been introduced with the new CRMA1 in-house calibre, that is contained inside a case that takes six days of set-up and machining and five hours of polishing to complete – even the words ‘Richard Mille’ on the back take forty-five hours to engrave.

But I digress; we were talking about the buttons. There is one at four o’clock, and one at ten o’clock, and both are independent of each other. As with the crown, they are available in either grade five polished titanium, rose gold or white gold. The crown itself is an ingenious bit of design, because it isn’t directly fitted to the movement. Most crowns are screwed onto a stem, a long thin tube that is then held in place in the movement by a retaining screw, but this can lead to movement damage if the crown experiences a sharp knock.

What Richard Mille have done is separate the crown from the mechanism completely, and so there is now no direct connection, and no risk to the movement if the crown gets damaged. The new design also allows the development of another interesting function which is operated by the button at four o’clock.

So – the buttons! The one on the right cycles through the crown settings which are Neutral (the crown does nothing), Winding (the crown winds) and Hand Setting (the crown adjusts the time) which removes the need for unscrewing the crown or pulling it out to set the watch.

The button on the left is the best one – it advances the date by one day, so when it comes to a thirty day month, instead of fiddling about with the crown, accidentally changing the time and getting all frustrated, just one press on the button and all is sorted.

So simple, yet so effective. I love buttons!