The gold pocket watch, which featured 24 complications, was the result of a long-standing competition between two magnates of America's Gilded Age. New York financier Henry Graves Jr. and Ohio automobile engineer James Ward Packard vied with one another to own a timepiece with the greatest possible number of complications. (Complications are mechanical functions of the watch other than the hours, minutes and seconds.) Packard commissioned 13 complicated watches from Patek Philippe between 1900 and 1927. They included a perpetual calendar with phases and age of the moon, indication of sunrise and sunset, and a celestial chart depicting the constellations of stars in the sky over Packard's home in Ohio.
Not to be outdone, Henry Graves Jr. also commissioned a series of complicated watches from Patek Philippe, culminating in a timepiece that took three years to design and five years to produce. When completed in 1933, the watch had a different horological function for each hour of the day and included a chart of the nighttime sky over Graves' home in New York.
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