The F. P. Journe Vagabondage III

Even in the seemingly simple world of time-only watches, there is an enormous amount of variety in design, materials, mechanisms, and just about everything else you can imagine. What just about all such watches have in common, however, is that you read the time off the watch hands – hours, minutes, and seconds. There are however a small group of watches that show the time on digital displays – wandering hours watches, for instance, like the <a href="../blog/jacks-pick-week-audemars-piguet-star-wheel.html">Audemars Piguet Starwheel</a>. Another relatively small group of wristwatches use jumping hours displays, usually in combination with a minute hand and seconds hand (or with no seconds hand to clutter things up, like the <a href="../shop/Cartier-Rotonde-De-Cartier-W1553851.html">Rotonde de Cartier Jump Hour</a>).
And then, there is a very small, very select group of watches with full digital displays of the hours, and both the tens and ones digits for the minutes. These include the <a href="../blog/lange-zeitwerk-history.html">A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk</a>, the Harry Winston Opus III, the Pallweber-style jumping hours and minutes watches from IWC, and the extremely odd Harry Winston Opus 8 – quite literally, a mecha-digital, ultra-luxury G-shock, you could say (which I don’t think ever actually made it into production – I thought it was delightful in 2008 but I don’t think they ever got it to work and certainly, a quarter million-dollar, white gold version of a G-Shock <a href="https://en.worldtempus.com/watches/opus-8-4299.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">was not exactly anything anyone had asked for</a>). And then there is the subject of this installment of A Watch A Week: The <a href="../watches/f-p--journe/">F. P. Journe</a> Vagabondage.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1166266" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/01-03-2022-Vagabondage-Series.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="" width="1400" height="944" />
The Vagabondage exists in four series. According to Journe, the original plans for the watch didn’t call for multiple series to be produced at all – in fact, the first series could barely be called a series, as it consisted of just three watches. As Journe told Revolution Magazine in 2017, the first Vagabondage watches were the result of a request from Antiquorum to create a special watch to commemorate the company’s 30th anniversary, in 2004. Journe had only six months to fulfill the request, so he turned to a movement he’d created in 1995, but never had a chance to use, which was originally made as a unique piece for a private collector. A major watch brand expressed interest in the movement, so Journe created a prototype but the project fell through and the movement went into a drawer, and was, more or less, forgotten – until Antiquorum called. Journe would tell Revolution:
“Some years later, ahead of their 30th anniversary charity auction, Antiquorum approached me and asked for me to create a special watch to be auctioned off at their anniversary sale. Problem was that when they had asked me, there was only six months left until the date of the auction.
“I had to resort to one of the many pieces that I had had to put in my drawer for one reason or another. It was then that I felt that this was the right time to bring my watch with the vagabond hours out from my drawer and give it to the world. Thus was born the Vagabondage.
I created three pieces of the watch for the auction. One in red gold, white and, of course, yellow gold in a “tonneau” shaped case. I had never created a watch in such a case shape before. So, it stands apart from everything else I had created until that time. Hence again why the name Vagabondage was so appropriate for the watch. Although, this very fact also made me wonder how the new case shape would perform at the auction and with my collector base.
“To my surprise, all three watches sold off at three times their estimates. The watch’s reception amongst collectors, too, was simply phenomenal. So much so that some came and asked, “why didn’t you make one for me?!”
The result was the production of the first full series of Vagabondage watches, of which 69 were made, starting in 2005 (there were also a further ten watches made in platinum, set with baguette diamonds). The first series were not jumping hour watches per se – instead, they used a variation on the wandering hours display. The display is very unusual and as far as I know, unique to Journe – there is a frame enclosing the hour numeral which is printed on a disk, and the disk and frame travel together around the dial once per hour, with the frame jumping to the next hour as the hour turns over. (To get an idea of how the display works, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvBehVrW1y8&t=323s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">check out Tim Mosso’s video review</a>).
<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter" src="https://watchbox-sfcc.imgix.net/01-03-2022-Vagabondage-Jumping-Horus.gif" />
The number of watches in the series, and the name, has inspired some somewhat juvenile ribaldry in subsequent years but the number was chosen to accommodate a client who wanted that specific number (the original plan had been to make 66) and “vagabondage” is a perfectly respectable French word meaning “vagrancy,” or “roaming, wandering” and refers to the wandering hours display.
Vagabondage II, which was released in 2010, was, by contrast, a full jumping hours and minutes display wristwatch, with a single disk for the hours, and two disks for the ones and tens digits of the minutes; there’s also a small seconds sundial. (The first version of the Lange Zeitwerk, which has an in-line display of the hours and minutes, and uses four disks, had launched just the year before, in 2009. Both were preceded by the launch of the Opus 3 in 2003 however, the Opus 3’s launch was more announcement than actual launch – the mechanism proved to be simply too complex and required revision after revision by several watchmakers until a <a href="https://watchesbysjx.com/2012/05/the-first-harry-winston-opus-3-at-auction.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">working model finally debuted 10 years after the official launch</a>).
Finally, Vagabondage III was introduced, in 2017. It was a first – more specifically, the first-ever jumping digital display watch with a jumping hour, and jumping seconds display. The minutes are shown with a conventional minute hand. This was the last Vagabondage series produced, except for a re-release of the Vagabondage I with an updated movement, in 2022 (<a href="https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/fp-journe-vagabondage-2022-gold" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a 68 piece limited edition</a>).
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1166262" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/FP-Journe-Vagabondage-III-Dial.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="FP-Journe-Vagabondage-III-Dial" width="1400" height="1800" />
There are probably several reasons no one had ever done a jumping seconds display before but by far the biggest one is simply that it’s extremely hard to do. Watch hands, compared to the disks used in jumping digital display watches, are relatively light and they also move relatively slowly, so it doesn’t cost the mainspring all that much extra energy to move them (it is not a coincidence that the seconds hand on most watches is significantly thinner than the other two hands, both to reduce inertia and to maintain the poise, or balance, of the mass of the second hand on its post). If you remember that it took ten years to finally produce a working version of the Opus III you start to get an idea of the magnitude of the actual engineering problems.
A jumping seconds display has to move the ones digit disc one increment per second, and the tens digit disc every ten seconds and all three disks have to jump together at the change of the hour. That’s a lot of extra drag and in order to reduce the power drain on the movement, Journe used a mechanism for which he’s famous: the remontoire d’egalité.
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The remontoire d’égalité is essentially a second power source – usually, a secondary, smaller mainspring – located in the gear train of the movement, which is wound up periodically by the primary mainspring. The remontoire spring releases its energy at regular intervals, providing an even amount of energy to the escapement, and as long as the mainspring has enough power to rewind the remontoire spring, the escapement will receive an unchanging amount of torque for the entire power reserve of the watch (the spring remontoire was originally developed by English watchmaker John Harrison, and was used in his H4 marine chronometer, the first successful marine chronometer ever made).
In the case of Vagabondage III, the purpose is slightly different – the remontoire spring (a blade spring rather than a spiral spring, in this instance) stores and releases the energy necessary to advance the seconds disks, while at the same time maintaining an even amount of torque to the balance. The tens digit of the seconds display is turned by the ones digit disk and you can think of the whole thing as a kind of variation on a deadbeat, or jumping, seconds display but with the much greater challenge of advancing the two seconds disks rather than a small, light seconds hand. (Journe had also used a remontoire in Vagabondage II, for similar reasons).
In Tim Mosso’s video review, you can see an interesting aspect of the display. At the top of the video, the ones digit disc for the jumping seconds looks as if it is moving forward, not in discrete jumps, but with a kind of stuttering forward motion. This is because he’s started the video with the watch deliberately close to the end of its power reserve. He then winds the watch to its full power reserve at which point, the seconds disk begins jumping correctly. This reflects the fact that if the power reserve of a watch with a remontoire is low, the watch will still run, but there is not, at the low end of the power reserve, enough juice left in the mainspring barrel to keep the remontoire spring rewound.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1166261" src="https://watchbox-blog.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/FP-Journe-Vagabondage-III-Caseback.jpg?max-w=1024&q=50&auto=format,compress&usm=10&usmrad=3" alt="FP-Journe-Vagabondage-III-Caseback" width="2000" height="1556" />
The power display indication on the watch is therefore doubly useful; it lets you see the total running time remaining, and it warns you when the power reserve is dropping to the point where the remontoire will no longer rewind (which is about where the low power, red sector starts on the power reserve display).
Jumping digital display watches usually have a certain, shall we say, ursine heft, partly due to the complexity of their mechanisms and partly thanks to the amount of energy required to operate the complication. It’s a real credit to Journe that he managed to make, in the Vagabondage III, one of the most genuinely elegant and beautiful examples of the complication in existence – mechanically ingenious, and chock-full of the charm of classically informed watchmaking that’s one of the hallmarks of any timepiece by F. P. Journe.
<a class="btn btn-primary" style="width: 298px; margin: 0 auto; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;" role="button" href="../shop/F-P--Journe-Limited-VAIII-G-37-7-D-SK.html">SHOP THIS WATCH</a>

F.P. Journe

Written By

Jack Forster

WatchBox Global Editorial Director Jack Forster has been fascinated by every aspect of watches, clocks, and watchmaking for his entire life. He began systematically studying and learning about watches over 20 years ago, and during the first explosion of watch enthusiast forums, he became a moderator on thepurists.com. Jack became a full-time watch writer in 2007, when he joined Revolution Magazine, first as group technical and features editor, and then as editor in chief of Revolution Magazine USA. He joined the enthusiast website Hodinkee in 2015 as managing editor and then as Editor in Chief. In 2022, Jack joined WatchBox as the Global Editorial Director. He is the author of Cartier Time Art: Mechanics of Passion, and has written about watches, and other subjects, for many other venues including CNN, American Express Departures, and Vanity Fair.

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