FROM THE AUCTIONS. Sotheby’s auction house becomes the property of the magnate Patrick Drahi

The shareholders of the auction house Sotheby’s approved with 91% of the vote the proposal for the acquisition worth 3.7 billion dollars offered by Bidfair, a company belonging to the Franco-Israeli telecommunications magnate. The announcement of the negotiations dates back to June this year and in these days we have had the final confirmation.
Today, Sotheby’s is the oldest auction house in the world and one of the best known worldwide along with other giants such as Christie’s, Bonhams and Phillips.

Image courtesy of Sotheby’s

Founded in 1744 by the bookseller Samuel Baker, the business subsequently passed into the hands of his nephew John Sotheby. Since then more than two centuries have passed and the auction house has expanded internationally becoming one of the leaders with seventy departments and nine offices in the various countries, not to mention the countless connections in the rest of the world.
For watch enthusiasts, one of the records held by Sotheby’s is the November 2014 result with the exceptional sale for 23,237,000 Swiss francs of the multi-complicated Patek Philippe made for Henry Graves Jr. in 1932.

The watch in question was created in the 1930s as a challenge between the car industrial James Ward Packard and the banker Henry Graves, owner at the time of the manufacture Patek Philippe, about who would have owned the most complicated watch in the world.
From this competition, after three years of research, came to life a pocket watch with 24 complications: hours, minutes and seconds of the average solar time; hours, minutes and seconds of sidereal time (3); equation of time (1); indication of sunrise and sunset (2); Perpetual calendar, indication of the day of the month, week and month, lunar phases and the age of the moon (5); Daily star map of the night sky over New York (1); chronograph with split-seconds function, 60-minute and 12-hour counters (4); Small and large Westminster chime, minutes repeater and alarm (4); power reserve for time and striking work (2); double barrel with two-way wind up and three-way setting (2).
It’s certainly astounding to think that this masterpiece, made with techniques far away from the current computer instruments, remained the most complicated watch until the creation of the Calibre 89 of Patek Philippe in 1989 and the subsequent watches of the 90s and 2000s such the Franck Muller Aeternitas 4, which in 2009 won the prize of watch with the most complications in the world (36 in total).