There is a tiny aeroplane inside this watch. Look into the openworked movement and you find, down toward six o'clock, a little sculpted aircraft soaring over the curve of a globe, a miniature of an early flying machine frozen mid-flight among the wheels and bridges. It is a charming, almost whimsical thing to discover on the dial of a serious watch, but it is not decoration for its own sake. That aeroplane is the whole story of this watch, a tribute cast in metal to the man it is named after, and to understand it is to understand one of the most romantic tales in all of watchmaking.
The Santos is named for Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian aviation pioneer and one of the great celebrities of Belle Époque Paris, a dashing figure who flew airships over the city and, in 1906, made one of the first public powered flights in Europe. He was a friend of Louis Cartier, and he had a problem: fishing a pocket watch out of his clothing was impossible while piloting an aircraft with both hands full. So, around 1904, Cartier designed him a watch to wear on the wrist, with a flat square case he could read at a glance without ever letting go of the controls. It was one of the very first purpose-built men's wristwatches, born directly of the dawn of flight, and this watch carries that aviator's heritage right in its name and now, literally, in its heart. The little sculpted plane over the globe is Santos-Dumont himself, taking to the skies.
What makes this version so special is that it lays the whole mechanism bare to make room for that story. The watch is skeletonised, hollowed out so there is no conventional dial at all; instead you look straight through the movement, its bridges cut away to slender shapes and, in the Cartier manner, arranged so that the structure itself spells out the signature of the house, the word Cartier forming part of the architecture. Between those openworked bridges you can see the gears turning and, set among them, the aeroplane and its globe. It turns the act of reading the time into the pleasure of watching a tiny machine at work, and of being told, every time you glance down, the romantic story of flight.
Cleverest of all is how it winds itself, because this is an automatic watch that has solved a real problem. Normally a self-winding watch has a rotor, a weight that swings as you move and would, on a skeleton watch, swing right across the view and hide the very mechanism you want to see. Cartier's answer here is a micro-rotor, a much smaller winding weight sunk down into the plane of the movement itself rather than sitting on top of it, so it powers the watch from the motion of the wrist without ever blocking the openworked display. It is a sophisticated solution, letting the watch be both automatic and fully transparent at once, convenient to wear and beautiful to look through.
The case it all lives in is the timeless Santos design, one of the most recognisable shapes in watchmaking. It is square with softly rounded corners, flat and elegant, and its bezel is secured by eight exposed screws, a detail that has been part of the Santos since the beginning and that echoes the bolts and rivets of early aircraft and the great iron structures of Santos-Dumont's Paris. A blue sapphire cabochon caps the crown, and blued-steel sword-shaped hands sweep across the open movement, the one touch of colour against the silvery mechanics. In brushed steel on an alligator strap, it is handsome and modern and quietly sporty, the historic design in cool, contemporary dress.
And it is, of course, a Cartier, from the house that has been called the jeweler of kings and the king of jewellers, built and finished to the standard that name demands, the skeletonised movement decorated and assembled with real care, visible from both sides.
That is what makes this Santos-Dumont so captivating. It takes one of the most historically important designs in watchmaking, the aviator's watch Cartier made at the dawn of flight, and opens it right up into a skeleton, setting within the bare movement a sculpted aeroplane soaring over a globe in tribute to the pioneer who inspired it. Wound discreetly by a clever micro-rotor so the view is never blocked, framed by the screwed-down square case and lit by blued hands, it is a watch that tells both the time and a story, romance and engineering in a single transparent object, and it carries that storied heritage with all the effortless style of Cartier.
