The Da Vinci was the world's best-selling mechanical perpetual calendar, and its mechanism is one of the most modern and interesting ever made. It is therefore worth getting to know its inventor, Kurt Klaus, to whom the company has even dedicated a limited edition of the latest models made with the now famous KKK: the Kurt-Klaus-Kalendarium, soon to be retired (it will be replaced by a new perpetual calendar mechanism about which nothing is yet known). It was Kurt Klaus himself, in 2004, who told us about the birth of the Da Vinci: 'The era of pocket watches came to an end, so Hannes Pantli asked me for something new, similar to the calendar, but for a wristwatch. That's how I started thinking about a perpetual calendar. It took me four years to design it (without a computer, of course). At that time Günter Blümlein arrived at IWC: I showed him my idea and he supported me, but then he reconsidered. I had designed my calendar to add it to an automatic movement, but he said: 'There are so many perpetual calendars, but not so many chronographs with perpetual calendars. That's what we have to do'. I had to change the design to adapt it to a chronograph, but he gave me the drive to keep going and in 1985 IWC presented its first perpetual calendar chronograph in Basel. And not just any perpetual calendar. A simple mechanism, easy to handle, thanks to the absence of correctors (all indications, synchronised, are updated via the winding and regulating crown, ed.), and cheaper: 2,000 Swiss francs less than any other perpetual calendar! The competition was outclassed. There was a period after that presentation when we made more perpetual calendars than the entire watch industry: 2,000 in one year! From that moment on, IWC had the resources to create a team of people and an office for research and development of new products.' Pictured is Kurt Klaus, centre, in the late 1980s during the design of the IWC Grande Complication. To his left is Dominique Renaud and to his right, a very young Giulio Papi. Of Klaus, Papi told L'OROLOGIO: 'I learnt the design technique by working with Kurt Klaus, the creator of the perpetual Da Vinci. It was he who taught me the method. Perhaps because he is a watchmaker, like me, he was able to explain it to me in a way that I could understand'.
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