GAME CHANGER: CHOPARD L.U.C 1860 X REVOLUTION & THE RAKE LIMITED EDITION 1860 FEATURING THE CALIBRE 1.96
Do you remember the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when the monolith appears before the apes accompanied by the stirring refrains of Richard Strauss’s musical interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, endowing the primates with self-awareness and enlightenment? O.K., now flashback to 1996, a year when Tom Cruise was bellowing, “Show me the money!” to his ambassador of ‘quan’, and you will find a moment as revelatory, as forever game-changing as the appearance of Kubrick’s monolith. And that was when Karl-Friedrich Scheufele unveiled his first L.U.C movement, the calibre 1.96, which would usher in a staggering two decades of mechanical movement innovation and, with it, a heretofore unknown level of performance in every known complication in Christendom. And all this from a brand that was previously considered primarily a jeweller.
It is almost impossible to fully express how totally mindblowing Chopard’s L.U.C automatic calibre 1.96 was in the context of the mid 1990s. While Swiss mechanical watchmaking had pulled itself back from the
