Of the five watches in the Ruthenium series, this is the complicated one. F.P. Journe built the series from 2001 onward, ninety-nine pieces of each of the models, and the five he chose were the Tourbillon Souverain, the Chronometre a Resonance, the Octa Jour et Nuit, the Octa Calendrier and this Octa Chronographe. A chronograph is the most mechanically demanding thing on that list after the tourbillon, and including one in a limited series of this kind was not the obvious choice. The case is platinum at 40 mm, larger than the 38 mm that was standard for a complicated Journe at the time. The dial combines ruthenium applied over gold with whitened guilloche silver. Inside is a flyback chronograph with a sixty-minute counter and a large date. Ninety-nine were made in total and no more have been built at any point since.
Ruthenium is the reason the series exists and it is worth understanding what it actually is. It belongs to the platinum group of metals, it is extremely hard, it resists corrosion almost completely, and it is very seldom used in watchmaking because it is difficult to work and produces a color that resists easy description. The tone is a dark, cool gray carrying a faint blue cast to it, and it behaves quite differently under daylight than it does under artificial light, which is a large part of why these watches photograph so inconsistently. Journe applied it over gold on the dial rather than over any base metal, so that the treatment sits on a precious substrate throughout, and he paired it with whitened guilloche silver for the subdials and the remaining areas of the face. Set against a platinum case the ruthenium reads darker and cooler still than it ever does in isolation. The three chronograph counters, each cut in silver and screwed down with a polished steel circle, supply the only genuinely bright elements to be found anywhere on the watch. The case stands 10.6 mm tall with a sapphire crystal set into the back, through which the ruthenium treatment continues across the movement plates themselves.
The ruthenium went onto the movement as well as the dial, and that is the detail that gives the series its historical position. In 2001 Journe was still building his plates and bridges from brass, as the entire industry does, and a brass movement has to be plated to look right and to resist tarnishing. Rhodium and gilt are the two conventional choices for that plating, and between them they cover essentially the whole industry. Ruthenium is not, and applying it to the plates of a limited series was a deliberate departure from a process the manufacture was about to abandon entirely. Before the series had even finished running, Journe stopped using brass altogether and began machining plates and bridges from solid 18K rose gold, which needs no plating at all because the surface and the substance are one. The Ruthenium series therefore represents the final and most elaborate expression of a way of making movements that the manufacture was on the point of discarding. That timing was almost certainly a deliberate decision on his part. The calibre in this watch runs a flyback chronograph with a sixty-minute counter, using a cam rather than a column wheel and a single sliding lever to handle the reset, and it carries a power reserve of 120 hours from a mainspring a meter in length.
Choosing which five models to include says quite as much about the series as the choice of metal does. Journe could perfectly well have made ninety-nine examples of a single reference and been done with the whole thing, which is how the great majority of limited editions actually work. Instead he took a deliberate cross-section: the tourbillon that had made his name, the resonance that remains his most original idea, and three watches drawn from the Octa family covering a day and night indication, an annual calendar and a chronograph. Set side by side, the five of them amount to a portrait of what the manufacture actually was in 2001, roughly two years after it had begun selling watches under its own name at all. Nothing at all in the group reads as filler, which is unusual for a set assembled this way. The chronograph in particular could very easily have been left out of it, since it was the most difficult of the Octa complications to build and much the least established, and its inclusion suggests fairly strongly that Journe wanted the series to show the full range of what he could do rather than only those parts of it that were already selling well.
This is a watch for the collector who is buying the manufacture's history rather than a complication, and who understands that the Ruthenium series is tracked piece by piece rather than merely statistically. Fewer than five hundred watches exist across all five of the models put together, and this one is a single example out of only ninety-nine. Provenance on any given example is generally establishable, and it certainly ought to be established before anything at all is agreed. Confirm the ruthenium treatment on both the dial and the movement plates, since that combination is precisely what defines the series, and a watch carrying only one of the two treatments is something else entirely. Examine the whole dial surface under good light for any wear through the ruthenium layer, which cannot afterward be reapplied to match the original. Then exercise the chronograph thoroughly, confirming that the hands return exactly to zero and that the flyback resets and restarts in one clean motion, and treat the original documentation as absolutely central on a series that has been catalogued this closely by collectors.
