Description: Gilt brass, front wound, movement with very rare Pouzait escapement (dial plate 47.2mm, ca. 14.2mm depth including center arbor). The two plate movement is separated by short, round pillars. Featuring a dead center second and de-centralized hour-minute subdial and a date subdial. The enameled copper dial with subdials is signed ‘Etienne Gille’.
Additional Info:
Pouzait Escapement:
Named after Jean Moïse Pouzait (1743 – 1793), watchmaker in Geneva. During the last quarter of the 18th century, several watchmakers tried to produce watches with dead center-seconds hands, much in favor among the scientific community and on the Chinese market. The attempt made by Moïse Pouzait featured a lever escapement associated with a large seconds-beating balance. Due to its spectacular aspect, and in spite if its inertia sensitivity, Pouzait’s escapement was much appreciated by the Chinese, before the invention by Jacot of the so-called ‘Chinese duplex’ escapement, enabling the production of dead center-seconds watches. In 1786 Pouzait made a model of his escapement which he presented to the Geneva Société des Arts, and which can still be seen in their collection. The idea seems to derive from the pin-wheel escapement in clocks and as in the pin-wheel there was no safety action (later ones, have the safety action). There are some differences, however: Pouzait’s pallets are not just pins, they are small pin-like rectangular teeth, so in fact it is an escapement with divided lift. Pouzait, who eleven years earlier had invented the independent seconds mechanism, possibly wanting to make a simpler mechanism for dead seconds. Whatever were his motives, he was one of the first to introduce the lever escapement to the Continent.
Antiquarian Horology 
