March 28, 2024
New Panerai PAM 578 “Lo Scienziato”

New Panerai PAM 578 “Lo Scienziato”

Officine Panerai, now headquartered in Neuchatel, Switzerland, traces its roots to Florence, in Italy’s Tuscany region, where it started out in 1860 as a watchmaker’s shop and school. Panerai instituted the Lo Scienziato collection of skeletonized tourbillon watches in 2010 in honor of Galileo Galilei, the Tuscan-born Renaissance figure who is today regarded as the father of modern science. Along with his numerous accomplishments in the fields of physics, astronomy, mathematics and engineering, Galileo also applied his genius to time-measurement problems, devising a system to calculate longitude at sea using Jupiter’s moons as a celestial clock and doing fundamental work on isochronism. The first Lo Scienziato (“The Scientist” in Italian) watches were 48 mm in diameter and had black ceramic Radiomir cases.

The new Lo Scienziato’s case (in the Luminor style, thus boasting the patented crown-lock lever bridge) measures 47 mm in diameter and is made of titanium, a metal known not only for its high corrosion resistance and hypoallergenic qualities but also for being 40 percent lighter than steel. In making the case, Panerai used an innovative technology that enabled it to be even lighter, hollowing it out internally to form a complex geometrical cavity without compromising the material’s solidity, tension-resistance, or water-resistance (to 100 meters’ depth). The process, called Direct Metal Laser Sintering, builds a 3D object layer by layer out of powdered titanium by means of a fiberoptic laser. The layers, each of which is only .02 mm thick, gradually merge to become completely solid and create a uniform surface appearance.

Panerai uses a skeletonized version of its in-house-made P.2005 movement, Caliber P.2005, in the Lo Scienziato. Renamed Caliber P.2005/T, it has plates and bridges made of titanium, like the case. Hence, the density to these components is about half that of brass, the traditional material used to make them, and the result is a movement that is 35 percent lighter than its predecessor, Caliber P.2005/S, which had been used in previous pieces in the Panerai Lo Scienziato collection. Further adding to the overall lightness of the ensemble is the lack of a traditional dial: all the elements that would normally appear on the dial are instead attached directly to either the front of the movement or to the inner flange of the case — such as the hour numerals, small seconds indicator at 9 o’clock, and the second-time-zone and day-night indicator at 3 o’clock.