Ulysse Nardin Channels its Maritime History with Freak ONE Navy Blue

Ulysse Nardin first forged its reputation as a world-leading manufacturer of marine chronometers in the 19th Century, and carried forth that horological stock-in-trade into the 20th as a prolific maker of nautical-themed luxury wristwatches. In the 21st Century, however, Ulysse Nardin’s identity has been indisputably defined by the game-changing and utterly unprecedented timepiece that it first launched in 2001 — yes, nearly a quarter-century ago now — the aptly named Freak. 

As I cover in much greater detail in this feature, the original Freak was the first watch designed to tell the time without hands, dial, or a crown in the traditional sense, instead using a “flying carousel” system in which a baguette-shaped movement rotates on its own axis with a bridge pointing to the minutes while a mainplate-mounted disk indicates the hours. Almost as notable at its launch was the Freak’s pioneering use of a material that is today far from ubiquitous, but also fairly common, in horological circles: silicon, a metal prized for its antimagnetic, shock-resistant, and nearly friction-free properties, which when used in movement components like hairsprings, imparts an increased level of precision and accuracy.

Over the years, Ulysse Nardin has subsequently expanded and updated the Freak into its own family of timepieces with new technologies and materials, all adhering to the original’s mission statement of (in the brand’s words) “inventive, rule-breaking watchmaking.” In 2023 came the latest iteration, the first Freak ONE, which was intended to bring the iconoclastic model back to its roots while also incorporating numerous innovations (many of them wildly experimental at the time) that had made their debut in subsequent Freak models into a coherent, streamlined package. The initial release, from Watches & Wonders Geneva, came in a 44mm case in rose gold and black DLC-coated titanium (above); its follow-up a few months later was the Freak ONE OPS, which adopted a military-chic black-and-khaki-green colorway. Today, Ulysse Nardin has unveiled the version that many of its fans were probably waiting for: the Freak ONE Navy Blue, whose black-and-indigo livery evokes the watchmaker’s maritime past.

Like its predecessors, the new model’s case is 44mm in diameter, here made of titanium and finished with a black DLC coating. The signature notched bezel is made of Carbonium, a low-carbon-impact material that Ulysse Nardin introduced into watchmaking in 2019. Traditionally used in the production of airplane fuselages and wings for the aeronautics industry, Carbonium offers an impressive strength-to-weight ratio and a distinctive marbled surface texture; the latter is a result of the process used to make it, which compresses tiny offcut carbon fibers as small as 7mm via heavy applications of heat and pressure, and weaves them together organically to create a unique finish on the surface. The Carbonium bezel, as fans of the Freak are probably aware, is also there to serve a purpose: in the absence of a typical crown, it winds the movement and locks into place when finished. An inset device in the back of the case serves to set the “hands.”

The movement and the dial, incidentally, are essentially the same. Ulysse Nardin’s Caliber UN-240 is on full display under the sapphire crystal, indicating the hour via a blue rotating disk with an intricately engraved sunray pattern, and the minute via the light-gray luminous tip of the flying carrousel that orbits the dial. The latter’s visually arresting technical elements include an extra-large oscillator and balance spring made of silicon, and an anchor and escapement wheel made of another technically innovative, patented substance drawn from previous iterations of the Freak: DiamonSil, which as its name implies is an extra-durable hybrid of silicon and synthetic diamond.

Caliber UN-240 features automatic winding and a robust power reserve of 90 hours, both attributes connected to yet another proprietary Ulysse Nardin invention, the highly efficient Grinder winding system, whose core concept has been likened, technically, to a hypothetical bicycle with four pedals instead of two. It’s designed to convert even the slightest motions of the wearer’s wrist to supply power to the movement, using a central ball-bearing rotor and three additional smaller ball bearings beneath it, linked to a flexible, four-armed frame that provides twice the torque of a typical, bidirectional rotor. The Grinder system is thus more constantly in motion to generate kinetic energy for the mainspring.

The Ulysse Nardin Freak ONE Navy Blue comes with two changeable straps, one in blue-and-black textured “ballistic” rubber, the other in two-tone blue-and-gray rubber; both are made from 30 percent recycled material and fasten to the wrist with deployant buckles made from black DLC-coated titanium and black ceramic. The price is $66,800.