Louis Jeansol Owner Review : Solar, poetic and unique

This watch is remarkable in more ways than one: -It is a watch imagined by an amateur, foreign to the world of watchmaking. It is designed outside the system to solve a specific question. The designer, Jean Louis Moulard, former financial director, is only a user disappointed that no watch shows him the sunny hours of the day. He therefore wanted a 24-hour dial with the mean solar noon at the top. To achieve this, a railway is needed that can turn in order to adjust the mean solar time according to the city where you are located according to the longitude and summer/winter time. 24-hour watches with noon at the top are not common even if Raketa has just released its Sputnik on this principle, watches with a mobile railway to really see noon at your door, or rather solar noon on your wrist are downright very rare. -It is a French watch, besides the designer, the manufacturer is French and the work is neat: Utinam Besançon. -It is a watch designed in the 2000s (the soltime patent dates from 2003) at a time when smartphones and smartwaches did not exist. Because now besides smartwatches for pilots that indicate sunrise and sunset wherever you want, there are applications that allow on any phone to have all the information you want on the screen. The advantage of the smartphone is that it can calculate the equation of time and indicate, not the mean solar time, but the true solar time for the given day, and set the precise position with the GPS, indicate the sunrise and sunset times (while the watch actually only indicates sunrises and sunsets at the notable points of the equinoxes and solstices, and only for the latitude of Paris (48.5°N). The world has changed a lot in a few years. -Finally, it can be used as a compass if the sun is visible (with the error of the equation of time since it is the mean solar noon that is indicated, for example that makes a difference of 13 minutes today, or an angle difference of 3°15' which is quite small). Of course, this watch requires that you lean over it like an instrument and the readability is not sufficient to see the time quickly in a fraction of a second with a movement of the wrist. (but it is often the case with 24-hour watches). Of course there are compromises. The idea of the metal mask is to make the moon appear when it is night and the sun when it is day. The idea is poetic (that is to say false. because a crescent moon to represent the night is a commonplace, in reality the moon does not appear more at night than during the day, it is simply that the day hinders the observation of the moon) but the realization is not really, it is a very serious design, which causes a slight cognitive dissonance. The drawing lacks a poetic side. This metal mask is not particularly beautiful either apart from the interesting reflections it can make at night or at dusk. It would have been better to make a dial with slightly different renderings for day and night and the in-between. A bit in the style of the new Raketa Sputnik or in a style that is certainly poetic to the detriment of the seriousness of precision as Fred Backer had been able to create thanks to the masks of the sun and stars in the watch of the Little Prince of Saint Exupéry. That being said, there are inevitably compromises to be made to keep production costs reasonable. The other compromise is the quartz movement, but since the second hand is so close to the center we do not notice its lack of fluidity. Ultimately it is a unique and endearing watch that deserves attention, and perhaps we can bring its idea to life again on other watches, in a more poetic way, even if it is true that smartphones are much more practical these days.