Only Watch is the biennial auction that raises money for research into Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and every participating house builds a single piece for it. Journe's 2017 entry was a split-seconds chronograph he had never made before, in a tantalum case at 44 mm, with a chrome blue dial in the manner of the Chronometre Bleu and scales in orange and yellow. It set a record for the brand when it crossed the block at Christie's in Geneva. The production version arrived the following year and became the LineSport rattrapante, which means this watch is the prototype for a whole family and exists exactly once. Journe has built for the auction in almost every edition since it began.
Tantalum is the material Journe reserves for Only Watch and uses almost nowhere else. It is dense, hard to machine, and takes on a blue-gray cast that sits between steel and platinum without resembling either, which makes it the obvious choice for a watch built around a blue dial. The dial itself is chrome blue rather than lacquered, so it reflects the room and changes depth as the wrist moves, exactly as the Chronometre Bleu does. Two scales run across it in colors the house has never used elsewhere: an orange tachymeter reading speed over a kilometer and a yellow telemeter reading the distance sound has covered. The numerals were drawn new for this watch and carried into the production series afterwards. Two counters and a date complete the layout. Chrome is not a finish the house uses on anything else except the Chronometre Bleu, and putting it on a chronograph dial was the risk in this watch. A reflective surface fights with printed scales, and there are two of them here in colors chosen to be seen rather than to blend. It works because the scales are thin and the numerals are large, so the eye separates them by size instead of by contrast. Tantalum around it is nearly the same tone as the dial in some light, which makes the whole watch read as one object rather than as a face in a case.
The movement is the 1517, hand wound, and it is not the movement the production watches use. A monopusher chronograph runs its entire cycle through one control: press to start, press to stop, press again to return to zero. Adding a rattrapante means a second hand rides beneath the first, can be halted to record an intermediate time, and then catches up in an instant when it is released. The two functions together require a mechanism considerably more involved than either alone. In this watch the chronograph engages through a traditional horizontal coupling executed to a standard the production version does not attempt, with black polished levers and springs throughout, which is why the mechanism looks denser through the back than the later one does. The telemeter scale is worth explaining because almost nobody fits one any more. It reads the distance sound has covered in the time measured, which historically meant timing the gap between a flash and a report and reading off how far away it was. Pairing it with a tachymeter on the same dial gives the watch two entirely different measurements taken from the same running hand, and putting them in orange and yellow rather than in black keeps them apart. Neither scale survived into the production watches, which carry a tachymeter on the bezel instead and nothing on the dial at all.
Only Watch pieces occupy a strange place in any catalogue. They are made once, sold once, and then disappear into a collection, and the record of them is an auction lot rather than a reference. Journe has contributed to nearly every edition, generally in tantalum, and the 2017 entry is the one that had the largest consequence, since the house turned it into a production model within a year. The LineSport rattrapante that followed carries a different movement, a different case material and a very large date the unique piece does not have, so the two are related rather than identical. Reviewers who have handled both generally judge the production movement the better of the two, which is an unusual thing to be able to say. Tantalum is the other thread running through Journe's Only Watch contributions. He has used it repeatedly for the auction and almost never outside it, which has turned the material into a signal: a tantalum Journe is an auction piece and a charity piece before it is anything else. The metal itself is difficult enough to work that few houses bother, and its color is close enough to steel that most people miss it entirely, which suits a watch made for a cause rather than for a shop window. Tantalum has never appeared in the standard collection.
This is not a watch that comes up, and when it does the questions are entirely about provenance. There is one, its history runs through a charity auction with a public record, and everything about it can be established from that record. The tantalum case is effectively permanent and the dial is the only element that could deteriorate. What it offers beyond the obvious is a direct view of how a family begins: the numerals, the case size, the ceramic tachymeter bezel and the general idea all carried into the production watches, and this is where they first appeared. Anyone considering it is buying the origin rather than the object. Anyone who wants the watch itself rather than its history should look at the LineSport versions, which are better resolved in almost every respect and can actually be bought. What cannot be bought twice is the fact that this one was made for a cause, sold in a room, and never repeated.
