The Bremont Hawking Limited Edition Collection is decorated with fragments from the desk where Stephen Hawking worked from 1975 until his death two years ago.

And then along comes Bremont, a newbie in watch design terms – it presented its first watch a mere 12 years ago – but now Britain’s largest watchmaker. Today, it serves up the Hawking Limited Edition Collection, a trio of watches containing wood lifted from the drawer of an 18th-century desk that once belonged to the late professor Stephen Hawking.

As watch enthusiasts will know, Bremont has developed an uncommon knack for this sort of thing. Since 2008, when it introduced a watch entombing parts of a Spitfire EP120, it has produced pieces carrying fragments from historic artefacts as heroic as an Enigma coding machine, HMS Victory and the thundering failure that was Howards Hughes’ bonkers H-4 Hercules.

Bremont has created three men’s automatics, 388 pieces in steel and 88 in both rose and white gold. Beyond the case materials, the dial programme is the same across all three: an oversized “grand” date at 12 o’clock; a 30-second retrograde seconds hand at six that pings back to zero twice a minute; and an eight-minute scale between 12 and two that becomes a whimsical indication of the time it takes for light to travel from the sun to the earth.

On the case back, Bremont has created a mini-cosmos inspired by the night sky in Oxford on 8 January 1942, the date Hawking was born. There’s a lunar shape made of one of watchmaking’s current go-to exotic materials, meteorite, and four planets made from wood taken from that drawer in Hawking’s desk. An inscription shows the ten-character equation that summarises Hawking’s famous black hole theory and the watch serial number appears laser-engraved into a piece of his manuscript paper.