Watchmaking
Horology has enjoyed a long history of bold design, precision craftsmanship and the fearless pursuit of innovation. Diatom continues this legacy by manufacturing many of our materials and components right here in the UK, utilising our co-founders’ collective decades of materials science experience to produce new alloys that push watchmaking to places it’s never been before.
At the cutting edge
Diatom is at the cutting edge of materials science, creating novel alloys through innovative forging techniques and advanced manufacturing processes. Our ambition is to stabilise and preserve artefacts from humanity’s most ambitious space missions. By combining them with high-strength matrices and other judiciously selected elements, we create never-before-seen materials that retain the historic significance of the original artefacts while guaranteeing peak horological performance.
Forging the future
Our proprietary Diatom alloys are formed by fusing carefully selected alloying agents with stabilised materials recovered from prominent spacecraft. Through the controlled application of heat and pressure, these contrasting materials are fused together at a microscopic level to create a uniform structure. Once formed into an ingot, the alloy is then hot-rolled into plates and quench hardened to imbue it with a high-strength microstructure.
Made to measure
An artefact’s preservation doesn’t end once the alloy is forged. The plates then undergo further rounds of hot-rolling and annealing to produce billets that are primed and ready for component fabrication. These are subsequently precision machined into the required form using state-of-the-art CNC technologies, with each piece subject to strict quality control measures that ensure a perfect fit during the assembly process.
Assembled by hand
These unique components are then hand assembled into timepieces that carry the legacy of the Space Age inside their very DNA, built from the ground up to elevate watchmaking to a new level.