Patek Philippe’s most famous collectors’ duel was made up by one of its directors.
The story has banker Henry Graves Jr. racing carmaker James Ward Packard for the world’s most complicated watch, and it helped Graves’s Supercomplication of 1933 fetch $24 million in 2014. Alan Banbery, a former Patek director, later admitted floating it in the early 1990s to promote the Calibre 89. There is no evidence the two men ever met.
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