Superstar! The Holy Grail of Watches Scores New World Interscope Records.

The Henry Graves Jr. Super complication, dubbed the “world’s most famous watch,” scored $24 million at Sotheby’s Nov. 11 Important Watch auction in Geneva, reaffirming its status as the world’s most valuable timepiece.

The Super complication has been called the holy grail of watches, in part because of its fabled and quite complicated history. It was created as the result of a 1925 “contest” between two watch collectors, New York City banking magnate Henry Graves Jr. and automaker James Ward Packard, to see who could create the most complicated watch.

Eight years later, at the height of the Depression, Patek Philippe delivered to Graves the final product, which claimed the title of the most complicated watch in the world for 56 years, when another Patek Philippe watch, fashioned in part by a computer, finally topped it with 33 complications. (The Super complication is still considered the most complicated watch ever built by hand.)

The 14k gold watch comprises 900 individual parts and boasts 24 complications (features other than time), including a perpetual calendar that extends to the year 2100, indications for the time of sunset and sunrise, a stopwatch for hours and minutes, an alarm, a map of the sky over Graves’ New York City apartment, and chimes that sound like Big Ben.