The Henry Graves Supercomplication

A banker's commission

Henry Graves Jr was a New York banker and one of the great watch collectors of the early twentieth century. He commissioned a gold pocket watch from Patek Philippe in the mid 1920s, and the firm spent about three years designing it and five more making it. It was delivered to him on 19 January 1933.

A popular story says Graves wanted to beat the car maker James Ward Packard, another Patek collector, in a race for the most complicated watch. Historians now treat that rivalry as doubtful, but the result is not in doubt: the watch held the title of most complicated watch in the world for more than 50 years.

Inside the case

The Supercomplication has 24 complications in a double-dialled gold case. It chimes like a small clock, with Westminster chimes, grande and petite sonnerie and a minute repeater. It also has a split-seconds chronograph, a perpetual calendar, moon phases, sunrise and sunset times and a map of the night sky over New York as seen from Graves's Fifth Avenue apartment.

All of this needed 920 individual parts, including 430 screws, 110 wheels and 70 jewels. Everything was calculated and made without computers, which is why the watch is still described as the most complicated ever made entirely by hand. Patek Philippe's Calibre 89 of 1989, with 33 complications, finally took the overall title.

Owners and a museum

After Graves died in 1953 the watch passed through his family. In 1969 it was sold to the industrialist Seth Atwood, who displayed it at his Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois, for three decades.

When that museum closed, the watch went to auction at Sotheby's New York in December 1999 and sold for about 11 million US dollars, a record at the time. It was later shown at the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva between 2001 and 2005, so visitors could see it in person.

The 2014 record

On 11 November 2014 the Supercomplication returned to auction at Sotheby's in Geneva and sold for CHF 23,237,000, about 24 million US dollars. For five years it was the most expensive watch ever sold at auction.

That record passed to the Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime in 2019, but the Supercomplication is still the most expensive pocket watch sold at auction. The photograph above shows a different Patek Philippe complicated pocket watch from about 1895, which gives a sense of the craft involved.

← Patek Philippe Grandmaster ChimePaul Newman's Rolex Daytona →