The Krayon Anywhere Universal Sunrise-Sunset Complication

I've always found the sunrise-sunset complication to be one of the most intellectually beautiful complications in horology – there is something about having the rhythms of celestial objects reproduced in miniature on the wrist that is irresistible. Sunrise-sunset complications have been used in clocks for centuries and can be found in pocket watches as well – the Patek Philippe Graves Supercomplication is one example, and, more recently, Vacheron Constantin's ref. 57260 is another (and it's also, lest we forget, the most complicated watch ever made, albeit at 76mm x 31mm, it pushes the notion of portability to its limit). However, it did not appear in a wristwatch until the introduction of the Jules Audemars Equation Of Time in the year 2000. That watch was closely followed, the same year, by German watchmaker Martin Braun's EOS wristwatch – both groundbreaking watches technically and aesthetically.

Martin Braun EOS watch, about 2006, with cams for Singapore; sold at Sotheby's in March 2020.

The only disadvantage to the complication and, probably, at least part of the reason it took so long to appear in a wristwatch is that it is highly location-dependent; it can only show sunrise-sunset times in a single location. The sunrise-sunset complication works in basically the same way as the Equation Of Time – there are two cams, one for the time of sunrise and one for sunset, which rotate once per year. The outer edges of the cams vary in radius, depending on where in the year you are, and a feeler lever riding along the edge of the cam translates this variation into the to-and-fro movement of the sunrise and sunset indications, as the day lengthens and shortens. The first watch (actually, I believe, the first mechanical timepiece of any kind) able to display sunrise-sunset times almost anywhere in the world, without having to change cams, was the Krayon Everywhere watch, with a mechanism designed by founder Rémi Maillat.

The Krayon Everywhere watch, in 2018.

The Everywhere is a programmable sunrise-sunset watch. The user inputs the date, latitude and longitude of their location, and UTC (all of which can be done via the crown, remarkably enough), and the watch will show the times of sunset and sunrise, as well as the duration of day and night, for their location. It is an ingenious but also extremely complex timepiece (over 600 components), although Maillat's design allows it to be remarkably flat, at just 11.7mm. It is also very expensive, unsurprisingly enough, at about $600,000 to start, depending on the number of customizations the potential owner desires. The Anywhere watch is based on the same fundamental idea but is less complex and correspondingly less expensive, and it still has much of the charm of the original Everywhere.