To a watch connoisseur, the name Greubel Forsey (well, names, actually –Stephen Forsey and Robert Greubel, the two founders, met while both were working at Audemars Piguet’s high complications lab, Renaud & Papi) has thus far meant one thing: the fanatically single minded pursuit of one of the most quixotic goals in horology.

Once upon a time, there was a mad scientist named Ludwig Oechslin who was discovered by a mad entrepreneur named Rolf Schnyder. Schnyder and Oeschlin worked together at Schyder’s company, Ulysse Nardin, on some of the world’s most unusual and amazingly different watches, including the Ulysse Nardin Freak, as well as a series of fantastic astronomical complications that could do things like show the position of the moon and planets, predict eclipses, and the slow yearly cycle of the Earth’s tilt on its axis.

Parmigiani Fleurier is on every watch lover’s radar in a big way right now, thanks to an unprecedented exhibition it’s brought to the United States for the first time in history. The collection is the Maurice Sandoz Collection of clocks, watches, and mechanical automata, which was assembled by the son of the founder of Sandoz Laboratories.

As regular Haute Time readers know, extra thin watches have a big place in our hearts, and in the small world of ultra slim timepieces there are few bigger names than the oldest in the business, Vacheron Constantin. Extra flat watches have been a speciality of the firm’s for, quite literally, centuries.

The watches of Urwerk are a very new twist on a very old idea. In Urwerk watches, a “time satellite” carrying the hour indication crosses a sector of the dial marked with the minutes; as the satellite carrier reaches the 60 minute mark a new hour marker appears at 0 and the whole process starts over.

There’s nobody quite like Maximilian Büsser –or like his company, Maximilian Büsser & Friends, a cooperative of designers, watchmakers, and other assorted talents which he put together in 2005 after leaving his position as head of the fine watchmaking department at Harry Winston.

The name Zenith might conjure images of old television sets and radios to a lot of Americans but to watch lovers, it’s a magic word that summons images of one of Switzerland’s most respected manufacturers.

Vacheron Constantin is famous among horological cognoscenti for being the oldest of the great Swiss watchmaking firms –in continuous operation since 1755, it’s been active in the United States since 1832, and over the years it’s counted among its fans the Wright Brothers (for whom the firm made the watch used to time the first powered flights in 1903) William James (brother of novelist Henry James) and financier Henry Graves, who owned a complicated Vacheron Constantin pocket watch which sold at a recent Christie’s auction for the princely sum of $1,762,500 –over twice the maximum estimate.

There’s no company better known than Piaget for making the kind of watch that was once the last word in elegance: thin, gold, and automatic.