Our Paradoxical Vision of Luxury
We devoted great effort to the choice of materials and the design of the watch. By selecting grade 5 titanium, we were able to work it in such a way as to create varied surfaces on which light would react differently.
The design took time to complete: we wanted it to be minimalist, purist, timeless, yet also imbued with strong symbolism, referencing key moments of humanity and the watch’s relationship with the elements.
In short, we refined every detail to craft a watch of true luxury.
Paradoxically, we have never associated the essence of luxury with the object itself, but with the vision of time it reveals.
We have detached the notion of luxury from materialism, from mere possession. On the contrary, it lies outside, in what one sees, in what one feels when contemplating time without ever owning it. This is the true essence of luxury.
This new ritual of time is about becoming aware of the beauty and miracle of life, a spectacle that nature offers us at every instant. Whoever embraces this perspective is, in truth, the richest of all.
Our watches aspire to be the humble guardian of a meaning that transcends the object.
AugéMade for Pioneers
A New Luxury Carried by New Totems
Luxury is often expressed as a drive to possess. The object is sacralized for its material value. Owning it becomes a satisfaction in itself, one that feeds a certain form of egocentrism.
We believe, on the contrary, that true luxury is lived through openness.
We design totems that do not embody luxury, but open themselves to it. True luxury is the splendor of the outside world. Observe: behind every second lie details filled with meaning. Luxury no longer resides in materialism, but in the appreciation of what we will never master: our environment. Those who look outward often discover what they hold deepest within themselves.
We create totems that give meaning to time. Unique prisms to reveal the luxury hidden behind every second.
Augé Made for Pioneers
Ephemeral and Eternal.
It takes only the flutter of a butterfly’s wing for an Augé to stray for a moment from the thread of time before being reborn, unpredictable, until the very end of days.
Our timepieces are subject to the forces of nature. Untamed, the elements shift freely: the sun hides behind horizons that change with latitude. A fleeting cloud casts its shadow across the sky. At once vulnerable to natural whims and yet unchanging, it remains firmly rooted in its foundations: the magnetic field and the movements of the stars, born with the solar system and destined to endure until its end.
Unyielding and sensitive at once paradoxical.
We speak of a timepiece, yet this paradox is also lived by pioneers in their quest. One moment life smiles upon them, the world radiates with opportunity; the next, an unpredictable cloud appears, heralding the storm and the fog that blurs the pioneer’s steadfast perspective. And yet, time never stops. The elements never stand still. The wheel keeps turning.
After the rain, the calm returns; the star reappears, and the Augé reinterprets the hour upon the horizon, while its message remains intact. To never lose one’s course in ephemeral wanderings, to be guided by enduring values, in pursuit of timeless prosperity.
How to Read Time with the Since 4.6 B.Y.R.S.
Time never stops. But you can, to truly grasp its value. This timepiece offers a different interpretation of time. It does not rely on an internal mechanism beating the seconds; instead, it seeks the very marks of time within nature itself.
When Watchmaking Expertise Meets the Science of Time
Designing a timepiece that does not tick the seconds but instead captures the movement of the sun: a feat of engineering rarely attempted in the history of watchmaking. The Since 4.6 Billion Years by Augé translates into horological language an astronomical phenomenon observed since the birth of the solar system, 4.6 billion years ago.
As the Earth rotates, it gives us the illusion that the sun moves across the horizon. In reality, we observe the sun advancing 15 degrees per hour, regardless of season or location, and doing so with unwavering regularity.
Knowing this, we needed a fixed reference to measure the sun’s apparent motion. Once again, nature provided the answer: at the heart of our planet, a molten outer core of iron and nickel is in constant motion. These currents of liquid metal generate, through the dynamo effect, the Earth’s magnetic field, an invisible architecture that has shielded our planet for billions of years.
From this primal force emerge the magnetic poles, whose position shifts slowly over time yet remains stable enough to serve as a universal reference. It is upon this natural constant, forged by the most fundamental physics, that the Since 4.6 Billion Years bases its reading of time.
All that remained was to add a hand: that of a compass, measuring the angle between the sun’s position and the magnetic poles to indicate the time on the watch’s engraved bezel.
Obstacles Do Not Stop the Pioneer. They Shape His Path.
How can solar time be aligned with legal time, including across time zones? The solution: a rotating bezel, engraved with Roman numerals, allowing solar time to be synchronized with legal time, wherever one may be. Without it, the timepiece would remain a fixed sundial.
Does the watch function in both hemispheres, given the shifting behavior of the Earth’s magnetic field? Augé equips the Since 4.6 Billion Years with an exceptional compass, crafted by the Finnish specialist Suunto. This “global” compass works seamlessly across both hemispheres.
How to read the time with the watch
With the watch on your wrist, held perfectly horizontal, align the silver Augé logo (at 12 o’clock on the dial) with the sun. The compass rotates, stabilizes, and its pointers then indicate the time on the bezel.
On the bezel, engraved symbols of the sun and crescent moon distinguish the daytime hours (measured by the watch) from the nighttime hours (beyond its scope).
Behind this minimalist ritual lies a rare synthesis of watchmaking craftsmanship, astronomical physics, and micromechanics. The Since 4.6 Billion Years does not pursue atomic precision; it offers instead an experience, a new understanding of time itself.
Eighty hours that is the power reserve of some of the most accomplished automatic timepieces.
But when we think of time, the mind drifts toward eternity. What is eternity? What does it look like? What is its texture, its colour? Is there just one… or many eternities?
Then, the faint beat of the seconds hand pulls us back from reverie to the mechanical reality of those eighty hours, a limit, a cage.
How to escape, to approach the invisible, the poetry of eternal time? An everlasting watch seems impossible… until one dares to change perspective, to challenge beliefs, to break taboos.
The answer lies all around us. Time is here, waiting to be observed.
Since the birth of the solar system, the Sun has traced the horizon with the regularity of a metronome. Each hour it moves fifteen degrees, completing our planet’s rotation in twenty-four hours: 24 × 15° = 360°.
All that remains is to add hands to read the hour of our star and nature gives us everything: the magnetic field measured by a compass provides the reference against which to follow its course.
The Since 4.6 Billion Years runs solely on natural phenomena, its power reserve is eternal.
It is not an instrument that tells the time, It is the tangible face of time.
AugéMade for Pioneers
In 1863, the schooner Grafton set sail from Sydney. On board, Captain Thomas Musgrave and four companions — no state fleet, no inherited fortune, only their savings, their daring, and one goal: to reach Campbell Island in search of a vein of argentiferous tin that others doubted even existed. The subantarctic seas are treacherous. A storm drove them onto the remote shores of Carnley Harbour. For nineteen months, they endured — surviving through ingenuity, courage, and mutual support, crafting tools, shelter… and finally a small boat. Three of them braved 300 kilometers of open ocean to rescue the two left behind.
At Augé, we create instruments for those who venture beyond the beaten path, who read nature as others read the hour. A pioneer’s life demands bold choices, new perspectives, and the will to act. With the Since 4.6 B.Y.R.S. on your wrist, you will never lose sight of what truly matters.
Augé Made for Pioneers.
A Sky Full of Secrets
I wasn’t expecting to be floored in the middle of a quiet conversation over coffee, but there I was, stunned and blinking as I tried to process what I had just heard.
“You know we do have a picture of the Big Bang, right?” said Dr. Lena Mirek, an astrophysicist I met at a conference on cosmic origins in Prague. She said it as casually as if she'd mentioned a family photo from the 70s.
I laughed reflexively, thinking she was teasing. “A picture of the Big Bang? Come on. There weren’t even atoms back then, let alone people with cameras.”
She smiled gently, stirring her tea. “No, not a photo in the way you’re thinking. But yes, we do have an image of the universe as it was just 380,000 years after it began, what you might call its baby picture.”
The Universe Leaves a Trace
Say hello to this picture of the Big Bang! Not what you had imagined? We have to thank NASA for this image of an event that happened 13.6 billion years ago and is still displayed above our eyes in the sky.
Lena pulled up an image, an oval speckled with color. “This is the cosmic microwave background, or CMB,” she said. “It’s the oldest light we can see, released when the universe cooled enough for atoms to form.”
Before that moment, photons were constantly scattered by free electrons. But once protons and electrons combined into neutral hydrogen, light could travel freely. That light, stretched over billions of years, still reaches us today in the form of microwave radiation.
And those colored patches? “They represent tiny temperature variations, denser, slightly hotter regions that would eventually form galaxies,” Lena said.
How We Know It’s Real
The sky is full of signals, stars, dust, radiation. So how can we be sure this faint glow is from the Big Bang?
“The CMB has a very specific blackbody spectrum,” Lena explained. “By observing the sky at multiple microwave frequencies, we can subtract all the foreground noise and isolate the real signal.”
But the clincher is the structure. The temperature fluctuations in the CMB follow a predictable pattern, the same pattern scientists expected from early acoustic waves in the universe’s plasma. These predictions, made decades ago, match satellite observations with extraordinary precision.
“It’s like an echo,” Lena said. “And we can measure exactly when the shout occurred.”
More Than Just a Glow
The CMB is only one piece. There’s also the primordial abundance of light elements, hydrogen, helium, deuterium, and lithium, formed within minutes of the Big Bang. Their ratios, observed in distant stars and gas clouds, match theoretical predictions exactly.
Put together, these signatures form a consistent picture of a hot, dense origin. The Big Bang isn’t just an idea. It’s a theory backed by detailed, observable evidence.
What This Picture Really Means
A direct line to an era long before stars, long before galaxies. It’s the first light we can see, and the oldest light we will ever be able to detect.
It’s humbling to realize that we carry this picture not in photo albums or digital files, but across the fabric of the sky itself.
So next time you glance upward on a clear night, remember: you're not just looking at stars. You’re looking through billions of years of history, all the way back to the universe’s earliest whisper.
I used to think that having a calendar integrated into your watch was kind of basic, nothing much to say beyond that. I hadn’t thought it through. From the most intricate mechanical twists to a crocodile-proof watch, that reflection took me far. Try to keep up!
I met Jean-Marc Lefèvre, a master horologist in Geneva, who placed a Patek Philippe Ref. 3940 in front of me like it was a miniature cosmos.
"You see this cam?" he said, pointing near the center. "It rotates once every four years. That’s how the watch knows if it’s a leap year."
Building a perpetual calendar into a mechanical watch is no small feat. The Gregorian calendar, with its irregular months and leap years, doesn’t run like clockwork. To manage it mechanically, Patek Philippe designed a gear that rotates once every four years, linked to a set of cams and levers that automatically adjust for short months and leap years. Introduced in 1925, it allowed watches to track civil time accurately for decades, no manual correction needed.
A Different Kind of Calendar
While staring at Jean-Marc’s watch, I recalled something I’d seen months earlier, on a different continent. In East Africa, I had come across a calendar of another kind, ancient, instinctive, and alive.
Not visible from the ground, but from space, the Great Migration appears as a living loop stretching across Tanzania and Kenya. Over 1.5 million blue wildebeest, along with zebras and gazelles, move through the Serengeti and Maasai Mara in one of the most predictable natural events on Earth.
A Migration That Tells Time
I met Dr. Nyasha Mbeke, a wildlife ecologist in Arusha, who’s tracked this movement for over a decade.
"The wildebeest don’t read calendars," she told me outside her field station near Ngorongoro. "But their timing is so regular, we can tell the month just by where they are."
In January, the herds gather in the south to calve, around 500,000 births in a matter of weeks. By April, they shift northwest as the plains dry. In June, they face deadly river crossings. July and August take them north. By November, rains pull them south again.
Natural Mechanics
This isn’t random wandering. Wildebeest are biologically tuned to East Africa’s cycles. They can sense distant rain through changes in humidity and pressure. Their eyes detect subtle shifts in grass color. Internally, they follow circannual rhythms, biological clocks regulated by light and hormones like melatonin. Their bodies are optimized for long-distance travel: strong hearts, efficient kidneys, and high red blood cell counts.
A Watch with No Gears and Crocodile Proof
Like the cams and levers in a mechanical watch, the wildebeest follow a system driven by nature: rainfall, grass growth, instinct, and the unseen tracks of generations.
Watching their movement across satellite maps, dark clusters sweeping across green plains, I was struck by the elegance of it. No batteries. No calibration. Just biology in sync with Earth.
This natural watch is even crocodile-proof. Literally. When the herds cross the Grumeti River, hundreds of hungry reptiles are waiting, less impressed by the poetic timing of migration, and more focused on the buffet arriving by the thousands. Fortunately for the wildebeest (and the calendar), there are so many of them that a few losses to crocodile jaws don’t stop the march. The feast goes on, and so does the movement of time across the savannah.
In our world, it’s easy to stay on schedule. But if you ever feel unmoored, watch the wildebeest. You might not learn the date, but you’ll remember what time really means.
Fijando el horizonte: por qué el sextante sigue siendo importante
La primera vez que sostuve un sextante de latón, no fue en un museo. Fue a bordo de un buque escuela, el Hawthorne , frente a la costa de Nueva Escocia. Había sal en el aire, ninguna costa visible y solo el sol poniente flotando en el horizonte. Nuestro instructor, un veterano de la Marina Real Británica llamado Capitán Ellis, me entregó el instrumento y me dijo: «Dispara al sol. Te dirá dónde estás».
Ese momento, donde las matemáticas, la luz y el movimiento se fusionaron en un arco limpio y fluido, despertó en mí una fascinación que nunca me ha abandonado. El sextante es más que una herramienta. Es un portal a una época en la que conocer tu lugar en el mundo requería destreza, paciencia y una mirada al cielo. Por eso, en esta publicación, recorro la historia del sextante, desde sus orígenes hasta su obsolescencia digital, con relatos de quienes lo construyeron, lo usaron y lo preservaron.
Comienzos estelares: De los astrolabios a los dispositivos de sombra
Mucho antes de la existencia del sextante, los antiguos marineros ya miraban al cielo en busca de orientación. Visité a la Dra. Leyla Arabi en el Instituto de Navegación Histórica de la Universidad de Coímbra. Me mostró un astrolabio marinero del siglo XV, un disco de latón repleto de marcas de grados.
"Esto era de vanguardia en aquel entonces", dijo, dándole vueltas. "¿Pero usarlo en el mar? Casi imposible con mal tiempo".
Instrumentos como el astrolabio, el cuadrante y la cruceta sentaron las bases, pero todos se enfrentaban a un problema clave: el movimiento del mar. Mirar una estrella y el horizonte simultáneamente era poco fiable en un barco que se balanceaba. A finales del siglo XVI, la cruceta de John Davis permitía a los navegantes medir la altitud del sol de espaldas a él, basándose en las sombras en lugar de la visión directa. Era ingenioso y más seguro, pero no lo suficientemente preciso para las cambiantes exigencias de la navegación global.
Nace el sextante: espejos, matemáticas y un momento de 1731
El gran avance llegó con la doble reflexión. El principio era simple pero revolucionario: dos espejos permitían a un pequeño instrumento medir ángulos grandes con mayor precisión. Este concepto había sido esbozado nada menos que por Isaac Newton, pero nunca construyó un dispositivo funcional.
Esa tarea recayó en John Hadley, en Inglaterra, y Thomas Godfrey, en Pensilvania. En 1731, ambos desarrollaron independientemente lo que se conocería como el octante, técnicamente un arco de 45°, pero capaz de medir 90° gracias al sistema de espejos.
En los archivos de la Royal Society, conocí al conservador Malcolm Price, quien me mostró una réplica del primer instrumento de Hadley. «Lo increíble es la rapidez con la que se volvió indispensable», dijo. «A mediados de siglo, ningún navegante serio salía del puerto sin uno».
Para abordar la longitud (un problema mucho más complejo que la latitud), se necesitaba un arco más amplio. El capitán John Campbell, quien en 1757 propuso ampliar el octante a un arco de 60°, creó el primer sextante auténtico. El fabricante de instrumentos John Bird creó una belleza de latón de 20 pulgadas, que ahora se conserva en el Museo Marítimo Nacional.
Refinando la herramienta: La máquina de Ramsden y el auge de la precisión
Aunque la óptica básica del sextante se mantuvo constante, los ingenieros de los siglos XVIII y XIX lo convirtieron en una obra maestra de ingeniería de precisión. Jesse Ramsden, un nombre que a menudo se menciona con reverencia en los círculos relojeros, creó una máquina divisora mecánica en la década de 1760. Esto permitió graduaciones de escala ultrafinas, haciendo que los sextantes fueran legibles hasta fracciones de minuto.
Hablé con Lucien Carter, coleccionista privado de Portsmouth, quien me dejó manipular un sextante de la época de Ramsden. «Tiene una lectura de diez segundos de arco», dijo con orgullo. «Y el arco no se ha deformado en 200 años».
Los marcos de madera dieron paso al latón y al bronce. Las mirillas se convirtieron en telescopios, y a principios del siglo XX, las escalas vernier fueron sustituidas por tambores micrométricos. Los filtros de colores ayudaban a los usuarios a ver el sol con seguridad, y las abrazaderas de liberación rápida facilitaban los ajustes de ángulo.
Para la década de 1930, un sextante bien construido era un milagro de precisión mecánica. Y, sin embargo, seguía basándose en el mismo principio que Hadley había revelado dos siglos antes.
La brújula del océano: cómo el sextante transformó la navegación
Si hubiera que elegir un instrumento que posibilitó la exploración marítima global, sería el sextante. A finales del siglo XVIII, se convirtió en un elemento estándar en los barcos de exploración y comercio. El capitán James Cook, por ejemplo, llevó varios sextantes en sus viajes por el Pacífico. Uno, fabricado por el propio Ramsden, aún se conserva en el Museo Marítimo de Londres, desgastado por el uso, pero aún legible.
Visité el laboratorio de conservación del museo, donde la historiadora marítima Dra. Isabel Grant explicó su importancia: «Cook no solo los usaba para la latitud. También medía distancias lunares y calculaba la longitud sobre el terreno; esto fue revolucionario».
La fiabilidad del sextante era legendaria. Tras el Motín del Bounty, el capitán Bligh navegó en un bote abierto 3600 millas con tan solo sextante, cuadrante, brújula y reloj. Más de un siglo después, en 1916, Frank Worsley utilizó un sextante Heath & Co. de 8 pulgadas para guiar el bote salvavidas de Shackleton, el James Caird , a través del gélido Océano Antártico. Ese mismo sextante, con su armazón desgastado por la sal y el tiempo, se conserva actualmente en el Instituto Scott de Investigación Polar de Cambridge.
Navegación hacia el cielo: El sextante alza el vuelo
En el siglo XX, los pioneros de la aviación se enfrentaron al mismo reto que los marineros: cómo navegar sin puntos de referencia. ¿La solución? Adaptar el sextante.
En 1922, el navegante portugués Almirante Gago Coutinho inventó un sextante de burbuja, utilizando niveles de burbuja para simular el horizonte durante el vuelo. Él y su piloto volaron de Lisboa a Río utilizando únicamente la orientación de las estrellas.
La Dra. Helena Vargas, historiadora aeroespacial que conocí en el Museo del Aire de Lisboa, enfatizó el salto: «El vuelo de Coutinho demostró que la navegación astronómica funcionaba en el aire. Abrió las puertas a la aviación de largo alcance».
Los sextantes de aeronaves evolucionaron rápidamente. Los modelos Weems & Plath y los instrumentos de la serie Mark de la Armada estadounidense se utilizaron en bombarderos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Para la década de 1950, incluso aviones comerciales como el Boeing 707 contaban con cúpulas de sextante en el techo de la cabina.
El ocaso de un legado: el GPS y el declive del sextante
La historia da un giro radical en la década de 1990. El GPS, con su precisión casi perfecta, llegó como un rayo. De repente, navegar por las estrellas se sintió arcaico. Las ventas de sextantes se desplomaron. Hablé con un comerciante de equipos en Róterdam que llevaba 40 años vendiendo sextantes marinos.
"¿Después del GPS? Se acabó", dijo. "Pasamos de vender cientos al año a cinco. Quizás".
Pero no todos se rindieron. En 2015, debido a la preocupación por la vulnerabilidad del GPS, la Academia Naval de EE. UU. restableció la capacitación en navegación astronómica. "Si el sistema falla, un sextante sigue funcionando", dijo el teniente comandante Jordan Hill, un instructor de navegación que conocí en Annapolis. "Es un mecanismo de seguridad invulnerable".
Los instrumentos que perduraron: preservando los sextantes y sus historias
Hoy en día, los sextantes históricos se conservan no solo en vitrinas, sino en la memoria de la exploración misma. He visto el sextante de latón de Cook en Greenwich, el navegador de Bligh en Sídney y el maltrecho instrumento de Worsley en Cambridge. Cada uno cuenta una historia no solo de dónde estuvo alguien, sino también de cómo llegó allí y por qué fue importante.
Los museos de aviación conservan el prototipo de Coutinho, mientras que reliquias de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, como el sextante de burbuja RAF Mk IX, todavía aparecen en subastas de coleccionistas, a menudo con registros de vuelo guardados en sus estuches de terciopelo.
En las comunidades de navegación, un grupo pequeño pero dedicado aún practica este arte. El verano pasado participé en una sesión de observación de aves en Cape Cod. Sin aparatos electrónicos ni mapas. Solo arco, sombra y cielo.
Como dijo un veterano llamado Rob: «Con un sextante, no solo sabes dónde estás. Entiendes por qué estás ahí».
Orientaciones finales: la brújula inquebrantable del sextante
La historia del sextante es una historia de orientación humana, no solo geográfica, sino también intelectual. Representa nuestro deseo de medir, explorar y conocer.
Incluso en la era del GPS, todavía nos enseña algo atemporal: cómo mirar hacia afuera con un propósito y hacia adentro con precisión.
Y a veces, en una tranquila tarde en el océano, eso es todo lo que necesitas. Al menos, eso es lo que yo opto por creer.
