Some of these innovations feature today in the exhibitions at la Maison d’Ailleurs, as well as in Audemars Piguet’s heritage collection. Back on earth, designers drew on science fiction fads and dreamt up multiple on-trend designs. As Yuri Gagarin took the first journey into outer space in 1961, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, comic book heroes also set out to explore infinity – and beyond – to meet the characteristic little green men and track UFOs. These narratives gripped the public imagination and integrated popular culture, where their influence spilled over into other areas. These publications took readers beyond the confines of their world, embarking on spaceships to conquer the cosmos and journey to remote planets inhabited by extra-terrestrial creatures. Space exploration in the 1950s heralded a new golden age for sciencefiction comics and pulp magazines – inexpensive fiction magazines made using cheap wood pulp paper. This era also culminates in a crucial influential event for science fiction mania – mankind venturing into space. This pioneering style with broad metal surfaces and digital display – devoid of hands in a style known as a “jumping-hour” watch – prefigured the design for LCD watches four decades later in the 1970s. An Audemars Piguet pocket watch designed in 1931 offers the perfect illustration, its pure lines recalling the aerodynamism associated with the Streamline movement. Some were even decisively ahead of their time. Products and styles of the time – from futurism to the Streamline and Art Deco movements – reflected this newfound modernity. This progress in turn cast a new aesthetic for the arts and the manufacturing world. Sébastian Vivas, Audemars Piguet’s Heritage & Museum director, wholeheartedly believes that late-19th-century artistic and technological revolutions inspired faith in modernity. This emblematic metal used by both Black Panther and Captain America is reminiscent of the Swiss Jura mountains’ hallmark ironstone, which accelerated the development of metal work and watchmaking mastery in the Vallée de Joux.
In a nod to this bond between science fiction and watchmaking savoir-faire, Vibranium’s founding myths feature heavily. After Superman’s first appearance in 1938, these mutant heroes gradually made their way into pop culture in the 1960s. They fuelled fans’ fantasies of flying, defying gravity, achieving superhuman strength, taking on hulkish or infinitesimal size, healing spontaneously or boasting razor-sharp senses. These characters’ superpowers are sometimes influenced by outside forces that often take the shape of imaginary minerals. Wells’ novel pits two species against each other in a battle between good and evil – the Eloi, the heroes, against the Morlocks, the anti-heroes. Today’s heroes come to us from the world of Marvel comics – Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Spiderman, Deadpool, Wolverine, Daredevil and Black Panther – and are much more multi-dimensional. A mix of good and evil, each of these characters begins life in human form and develops a superpower after a scientific experiment or an accident.
Wells’ The Time Machine of 1895 certainly built a bridge between science and fiction. Regardless of the terminology we use, Jules Verne’s 1865 work From The Earth to the Moon and H.G.
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