DeWitt Academia Slide Only Watch 2019

The Academia Slide is a highly original and playful timepiece created by the independent, family run DeWitt Manufacture based in Geneva. The brand has donated a unique piece of this creation to benefit the Only watch charity auction.

While the manufacture has fully demonstrated its skill with traditional high end timepieces, the Academia collection also lends itself to particularly bold creative exercises. The Slide is the latest illustration of this approach.

This simple, intuitive design is also highly energy efficient. The hour plates slide in a natural, fluid manner. They are all interconnected: as soon as an hour arrives at the flat position, its plate begins its return to a vertical position and the next plate begins its descent. This continuous progression of the hours, which never freeze even for a second, symbolises the elusive, ephemeral nature of time.

The unusual star-shaped dial is a direct result of Jerome de Witt’s passion for mechanics. The creative soul of the manufacture and passionate collector of historic automotive developments was inspired here by the legendary rotary engines central to vintage cars and aero planes from the early 20th century.

These engines ran extremely smoothly thanks to their considerable inertia, a property that is fully exploited in the Academia Slide. They were also more compact and lightweight than other systems. Again, the Academia Slide takes full advantage of this, offering a simpler and therefore more reliable watch construction of just 276 components, scarcely more than a traditional three-hand manufacture movement.

Technical details

Case
Titanium with black DLC coating, sapphire case-back
Diameter: 49 mm
Thickness: 15.3mm

Dial
Circular-grained flat faces, polished angle, transferred graduated minutes scale

Movement
DW0101, mechanical self-winding movement manufactured by DeWitt
276 components, 22 jewels 28800 vph

Bracelet
Titanium with black DLC coating