The Urwerk Space-Time Blade features a sci-fi design and displays the hours and minutes using Nixie tubes.

The "Space-Time Blade," announced in 2024 by the independent Swiss watch brand Urwerk, is a 1.7m tall, 20kg total weight bronze and glass piece. It doesn't feature complex satellite displays, vagabond hours, or planetary gears, and instead uses Nixie tubes to display the hours and minutes. Let's take a look at this limited edition of just 33 pieces.

Urwerk's "Space-Time Blade" displays eight Nixie tubes

　The Urwerk watch brand and its founders, Martin Frey and Felix Baumgartner, have been known for their strong pursuit of originality since their founding.

　The Space-Time Blade, unveiled in 2024, is an extraordinary piece made of metal and glass, measuring 1.7m in height and weighing 20kg. As with their previous watches, it was the work of two passionate craftsmen who poured their energy into completing it, along with equally unique and dedicated artisans.

　What kind of clock is the Space Time Blade? Simply put, it's a vertical table clock inspired by the gnomon of a sundial, the oldest form of clock. Furthermore, it's a timepiece typical of Urwerk, measuring the Earth's rotation and revolution in kilometers.

　The clock is firmly fixed to the ground, towering like an obelisk, and displays the hours, minutes, seconds, and more.

"What we seek is for our watches to reflect the relationship between time and space," says Felix Baumgartner, master watchmaker and co-founder of Urwerk.

"As early as the 1800s, Gustave Sandoz made this relationship visible by creating a pendulum clock that displayed kilometres instead of hours. This ingenious instrument reminded us of our situation as mere passengers on a 'ship' called Earth hurtling through the galaxy at incredible speeds."

　Felix continues: "This is a concept we explored in the 100 Collection and reflected in the Space-Time Blade: visualising our journey, translating the 940 million kilometres we travel around the sun each year into hours, minutes and seconds."

　The base of the SpaceTime Blade is a massive Urwerk crown, forged by Radek Lukówka, a specialist in the lost-wax bronze casting process.

　He is a true artisan, a keeper of the almost-lost traditional techniques used to create delicate jewellery and fine ornaments.
A prototype is made using this, and a mold is taken from it to become the casting mold into which molten bronze is poured.

　The finished bronze base is then polished, buffed, and polished—a voluminous process that ensures Urwerk's aesthetic is fully realized.

　A glass dome mounted on this base protects the display mechanism. The glass is of precisely equal thickness from the base to the rounded top of the dome. Inside this dome are eight handmade Nixie tubes arranged vertically.

　The glass domes are fire-tested. After forming, they are cleaned and refined, so they contain no impurities. This beautiful glass dome is made from blown glass in a workshop near Novi Bor in the Czech Republic. This unique know-how is registered as an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, and the area where the workshop is located is known as the "Crystal Valley," a region renowned for its thriving glass industry.

　The Nixie tube display was also crafted by renowned Czech craftsmen. Each Nixie tube consists of numerous cathodes shaped like numbers or letters, and a single mesh-like anode. Each 0.1mm thick steel unit displays one of the 10 numbers, from 0 to 9. The font used for the numbers is the same as that used on Urwerk watch faces.

　Due to its extremely delicate structure, the entire unit is assembled piece by piece using tweezers, with each unit consisting of 88 parts.

　When an electric current is applied, the numbers appear in a warm orange hue. The Nixie tubes display not only hours, minutes, and seconds, but also tenths and hundredths of seconds, creating a visual representation of the passing of time. The display changes up to 500 times per second.

　The bronze remote control for this watch has a design reminiscent of the lightsaber from the movie Star Wars. It has eight display modes, from time measurement to distance measurement, and the mode can be changed using the remote control.

• Position 1: Hours, minutes, seconds
• Position 2: Hours, minutes, seconds, 1/10th of a second, 1/100th of a second
• Position 3: Day, month, year display
• Position 4: The distance the Earth rotates in one day at the equator in kilometers
• Position 5: Displays the Earth's daily revolution distance in kilometers
• Position 6: Earth's annual revolution distance in kilometers
• Position 7: Random display
• Position 8: Sleep mode

"Scientific instruments such as telescopes, microscopes and clocks have traditionally been made from bronze," says Martin Fry, "and Space-Time Blade takes inspiration from such instruments, but also draws on the design codes of science fiction, while also taking into account influences from popular culture. Space-Time Blade is as much an art and design object as it is a contemporary sculpture."