“It is not a dream of motorcars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, 1931
I’ve seen a lot of watches in my life. So, it’s rare for me to have a genuine moment of revelation. The whole “Archimedes in the bathtub, witnessing the water level rise and suddenly comprehending volumetric displacement, Eureka” thing. But the first time I actually held a Jacob & Co. Astronomia in my hands, I had to admit I was blown away. Sure, I had seen watches that placed the oscillator — the beating heart of the watch — on the dial, often in tourbillion format, and made it rotate around the perimeter. This was the idea behind Ulysse Nardin’s Freak created by Ludwig Oechslin and also Piaget’s Tourbillon Relatif designed by the brilliant Carole Forestier. (To be fair, the first concept of the Freak also came from Forestier.) But the Astronomia took the dial side animation initiated by these two watches and smashed it through the stratosphere to achieve an altogether different level of visual pyrotechnics and horological badassery.
Here now was a miniamphitheater contained within one of the most technically innovative and theatrically dazzling displays of time transformed into celestial poetry I had ever witnessed. It featured a four-arm carriage driven by a single almighty massive mainspring at the base of the watch. As the carriage turns, it compels — count ’em — a triple-axis gravitational tourbillion; a floating differential driven hour and minute dial with the miraculous capacity to always stay oriented upright; a 288-facet diamond and a miniature magnesium globe rendered in exquisite detail to represent the earth that both rotate once every 60 seconds, to all come to life. This carriage completes a full clockwise revolution every 20 minutes.
Accordingly, the tourbillon’s first axis of rotation is that of a traditional 60-second tourbillon, the next axis turns every five minutes, and its final axis follows the 20-minute revolution. In a subsequent sped-up version of the watch, the second axis of rotation takes just 2.5 minutes, the third axis turns every 10 minutes, while the diamond and magnesium globe rotate every 30 seconds. Taken together, this makes Jacob & Co.’s Astronomia the single most animated hypercomplicated timepiece of its kind on the market. Indeed, I feel the watch is actually even greater than the sum of its individual complications. When viewed as a whole, it is a wonderfully poetic way of linking us with the very foundation of time telling — but in the wildest, craziest, most out there and technically libidinous manner conceivable.
To me, this immediately begged the question: “Who’s the man that made a watch of such extraordinary horological ambition? Just who is Jacob Arabo?” I had to know, such was my respect for the achievement. But, to me, he was still enigmatic. Based on the incredible horological benchmark of the Astronomia, I decided to seek him out. We had, of course, met each other several times at Baselworld. And as a huge fan of hip-hop, especially ’90s New York Wu Tang, Biggie, Mobb Deep grime style rap, I was aware of his massive cultural impact on the scene. I, admittedly, always secretly coveted his legendary Five Time Zone watch worn by the likes of Jay-Z, Kanye and Pharrell. But this only made his story more intriguing. How do you transition from the quartz-driven Five Time Zone watch beloved by all hip-hop’s impresarios to something like the Astronomia? The Astronomia said something completely different to me. It spoke of a man with a very sincere, deeply intense appreciation of real horology. And this journey from 2002 when the Five Time Zone was launched to 2014 when he dropped the Astronomia at Baselworld intrigued me. What happened during this time? Did he meditate like Buddha under a Bodhi tree for 49 days, at which point he received horological enlightenment?
I wanted to understand why he
