Horological Meandering

aaronm
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Many Thoughts

First some clarifications:
1.  As used in watches, we are talking about chemically pure Silicon(Si), the second most common element on earth, most commonly found bound up with Oxygen to form quartz, (Si02).
2.  The Si is grown into large cylinders, called boules, which are then sliced into thin wafers for making parts.  All of this is the same tech that was perfected for making microchips, and is done in industrial quantities all over the world.
3.  The parts are designed using modern CAD software, by very talented designers and engineers, and then cut from the Si wafers using a combination of the photo-lithography that is used in chip manufacture and some techniques developed more specifically for watch parts.  The parts designs are a modification of the lever escapement as it has been used for the last 150 years*.  This is the generic technique, UN uses something different for their InnoVision where they grow some of the parts on cut Nickel pieces, and I don't know anything more about that.

This is the classic example of a "modern" technology.  A large amount of money and brain power is needed to develop the technology, refine it, and bring it to market.  Once that is all done, however, the parts can be mass produced almost perfectly, easily with sub-micron tolerances.  So it makes these watch more exclusive for now, as companies are going to keep the technology protected by patents, and have to recoup the RD costs, but eventually the technology could trickle down into lower-end products and loose it's cache.  A similar thing happened with plastic, initially it was this fantastic new material, celluloid was used in very high-end jewelery in the 1920s, but soon it became less exclusive and lost all value.

* none of this applies to the non-lever escaped watches from UN or GP's new movement.  They have developed a new form of escapement that uses the unique properties of the Si to make something impossible without it...

Of course, these are my thoughts, and I could, perhaps, be wrong. 
A