13 / 17Artwork 13 of 17Virtual exhibition
Life!
Mykola Syadristy2002
The hairspring of a wristwatch is the path of life: a tiny figure sets off along the spiral towards life's important and decisive moments.
The hairspring of a wristwatch
What to look for under the microscope
In numbers
- BaseThe hairspring of a wristwatch
- Width of the figure5 microns, narrower than a red blood cell (about 7 microns)
- MaterialGold figure
- 2002Year created
The story
The hairspring is the “heart” of a mechanical watch: its oscillation measures time. For Syadristy, the spiral of the spring is the path of life itself. We are all travellers moving along the spiral of time.
How it was made
The hardest part was fixing the 5-micron-wide figure to the thin, delicate spring. For this he used an almost invisible dot of adhesive, applied with the tip of a sharpened hair.
Did you know?
The story of temperature-resistant hairsprings leads to a Swiss physicist, Charles-Édouard Guillaume. The elasticity of the alloy he invented, elinvar, barely changes with temperature. His work earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920.
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