Vulcain’s Cricket doesn’t buzz you awake, it strikes: a hammer inside hits a pin roughly 1,300 times in 20 seconds. This edition changes what that strike sounds like, not just what the case weighs.
The Cricket is a hand-wound mechanical watch with a genuine mechanical alarm, not the vibrating motor “alarm” usually means on a wristwatch. Two separate mainspring barrels live inside the in-house Caliber V14 — one runs the timekeeping train, the other powers the alarm — so winding or setting the wake time doesn’t rob the watch of running power. Trigger it, and the hammer strikes a pin fixed to the inner caseback, which acts as a resonance membrane (Vulcain calls it the “harp”), while the perforated outer caseback works as the “wing,” an echo chamber that throws the sound outward. It’s a 1949 patent still doing the job unchanged.
The “President’s Watch” nickname rests on one well-documented gift and a lot of repeated lore. On his way out of the White House in 1953, Harry Truman received a 14-karat gold Cricket from the White House News Photographers’ Association, its caseback engraved “One More Please” — the line photographers shouted at him for one more shot, preserved in a photo held by the Truman Presidential Library. That’s the anchor. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Johnson (who reportedly bought his own in Geneva) turn up constantly in watch-press retellings as later Cricket owners, but the documentation thins fast after Truman. Treat the presidential thread as heritage worth knowing, not a verified chain of endorsements.
What’s new isn’t the mechanism, it’s how far the material swap goes. The 39mm case, bezel, and dial are Grade 5 titanium, as are the movement’s mainplate and bridges — expected territory for a “titanium watch.” Vulcain went further and rebuilt the alarm’s own sound path in titanium too: the anvil and the “V” piece that carry the hammer’s energy into the caseback are titanium now, and titanium conducts sound more efficiently than the steel it replaces. The material change should alter the alarm’s voice, not just the watch’s weight on the wrist.
Production is capped at 100 pieces. It’s currently preorder-only on vulcain.ch, priority going to Vulcain’s existing clients rather than open retail, with brown or black leather strap options and pricing that starts at $7,670. This isn’t a watch you buy on impulse or find on Amazon — it goes through the maker directly, allocation permitting.