The alarm complication is a mechanism that sounds an audible alert at a set time, and it ranks among the oldest genuinely useful complications you can put on a wrist. The principle looks simple but the execution is hard: a separate spring barrel stores energy, and when triggered a small hammer strikes a gong or sound spring, or buzzes a pin against the caseback. Vulcain started development in 1942 and released the first Cricket in 1947, running the hand-wound Calibre 120 with dual barrels, one for timekeeping and one for roughly 25 seconds of buzzing. After a Cricket was given to President Truman in 1952, it earned the nickname the President's Watch.
Three names anchor the category. Jaeger-LeCoultre introduced the Memovox in 1950, setting the alarm with an inner rotating disc rather than a fourth hand, and added the first automatic alarm calibre in 1956. The current Master Control Memovox Timer, a 40mm piece on the self-winding Calibre 956 with an added countdown function, runs about £12,400 in steel and £26,800 in pink gold. Patek Philippe's discontinued Alarm Travel Time 5520P sits at the top, with a platinum case and a gong that strikes for up to 40 seconds, trading on the secondary market between roughly £128,000 and £171,000. The modern Vulcain Cricket, on the V-10 and V-21 calibres, is the most accessible new alarm, starting around CHF 3,600.
When you buy, trust your ear: steel and titanium cases usually transmit the sound spring more clearly than gold, so case metal matters for actual wake-up power. On dual-crown designs the upper crown typically sets and arms the alarm, so learn to operate it without forcing the works. On the vintage side the obvious entry point is the Seiko Bell-Matic; the 1966 watch on calibres 4005 and 4006 turns up between £250 and £800 and is the smartest cheap way to live with a mechanical alarm. Standard vintage Memovox examples start around £1,600.
The collector's real reward is the vintage Memovox Polaris, reference E859, whose 1960s super-compressor diver case amplifies the alarm and which sells for roughly £13,000 to £26,000 depending on condition. Tudor's 2011 Heritage Advisor, a 42mm steel-and-titanium case with an in-house alarm module on an ETA 2892 base, remains an underrated buy. Ultimately the alarm is a character complication more than a practical one: wearing one in the phone era is choosing the small pleasure a mechanical sound can still deliver.
