Titanium is one of the most abundant metals on Earth.It is found in rocks and mineral sands, yet it took nearly two centuries to learn how to extract it properly.
A little known reason
In nature, titanium never exists in a pure state. It is chemically bonded to oxygen.Isolating the metal requires high temperatures and a controlled atmosphere, which explains its very late arrival in industry.
Why it first belonged to aerospace
Titanium offers a strength to weight ratio far superior to steel.Another surprising featureIt naturally forms a thin oxide layer that protects it from corrosion, with no additional treatment.This is why aerospace, then the medical field, adopted it long before anyone else.
A discreet yet decisive entry into watchmaking
The first titanium watches appeared in the 1970s.A detail often overlookedAt equal strength, a titanium case can be up to 40 percent lighter than a steel case.The resultA more comfortable watch, with excellent thermal control.Titanium conducts heat far less than steel, meaning it feels less cold on the wrist.Few people know this.
A crucial factor for our compass equipped watch
Titanium interacts very little with magnetic fields.Technically, its magnetic susceptibility is far lower than that of steel or brass.In a mechanical watch, this helps reduce disturbances to the movement.In a watch that contains a compass capsule, it becomes even more critical.
This is one of the main reasons we selected this material for the Since 4.6.B.Y.R.SA case that is light, strong, stable, and above all minimally influential on magnetic reading.
A choice based on facts, not trends.
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.
