Ceratanium? Carbonium? They’re Not Metals From the Marvel Universe—They’re in Watches
Experimenting with new materials has been trendy in haute horlogerie for some time now. But this winter, there’s been an absolute tidal wave of kooky metals that are fresh to watchmaking—and this Earth.
Choosing a case material for a watch used to be fairly simple: gold or steel, or a combination of both, with the occasional foray into titanium. Then came ceramics, carbon fiber, and DLC and PVD coatings, and the next thing we knew, dozens of watchmakers began creating their own proprietary metals and materials. We saw lots of these on display at the recent SIHH watch salon in Geneva, with increasingly zany made-up names—from Carbon Glass to Ceratanium. Here’s a rundown.
This year Panerai launched the Submersible as a standalone collection, independently of its parent Luminor family. Two of the leader models used high-tech materials. The first, Carbotech, which Panerai introduced to watchmaking in 2015, is formed by compressing thin carbon fiber sheets, stacked at angled layers, at high pressure and temperatures and binding them with a high-end polymer. The resulting tough, corrosion-resistant, lightweight material has a distinctive wavy surface that makes each case unique. Another material, BMG-Tech (the initials stand for “bulk metallic glass”), has the look and properties of titanium but is actually a glasslike composite of copper, aluminum, titanium, nickel, and zirconium, fabricated under high temperatures and pressures, then rapidly cooled so that the atoms don’t crystallize but instead congeal into an amorphous structure for extreme hardness and corrosion resistance.