Five Things

[Raza]

Time to sticky this until Alan can resume adding to it. This should never drop off the front page.

[geoffbot]

Time to sticky this until Alan can resume adding to it. This should never drop off the front page.

Done

[tribe125]

I wondered where it had gone - but it had been stickied. No-one looks up there.

[geoffbot]

I wondered where it had gone - but it had been stickied. No-one looks up there.

Yeah but in normal public if it dies it dies

[tribe125]

Coming soon...

more things.

[skywatch]

Coming soon...

more things.

Yayyy! More things!

Could we have five things? Please?

[tribe125]

• There are three Black Bays and they’re all in Canada. None of these places has anything to do with the Tudor Black Bay which isn’t named after anything. Pelagos means ‘sea’, but has also come to mean ‘that which is half-forgotten’.
  
  
• “Do better if possible, and that is always possible,” François Constantin wrote in a letter to Jacques-Barthélémi Vacheron in 1819. Which might be thought a bit cheeky, considering that Jacques-Barthélémi was the great-grandson of the company’s founder and Constantin was a travelling salesman. Constantin’s words were to become the company motto.
  
  
• Oris was once closely associated with Jaeger-LeCoultre. Well, maybe not that close, but in the late 1920s both were run by Jacques-David LeCoultre, who was also on the board of Patek Philippe. Arguably, it was Oris that kicked off the mechanical renaissance when they became quartz refuseniks and broke away from the ASUAG Group. This was in 1982, a year before Jean-Claude Biver planted his mechanical banner in the sand.
  
  
• George Daniels didn’t like electricians - which is how he referred to the pioneers of the quartz watch. “I was angry with the way they just strode through the watch world saying, ‘This is the future.’” In 1976, and prompted by the advent of quartz, Daniels decided it was time to improve the mechanical watch. Maybe George Daniels started the mechanical renaissance.
  
  
• Alternatively, the mechanical wristwatch survived because Patek Philippe and Rolex didn’t abandon it. Rolex decided that quartz would become banal, Patek Philippe decided to make a mechanical watch more complicated than any they had made before. If the flag-bearers were constant there were others who could make an appeal based on luxury, romance and craft.

[skywatch]

• Oris was once closely associated with Jaeger-LeCoultre. Well, maybe not that close, but in the late 1920s both were run by Jacques-David LeCoultre, who was also on the board of Patek Philippe. Arguably, it was Oris that kicked off the mechanical renaissance when they became quartz refuseniks and broke away from the ASUAG Group. This was in 1982, a year before Jean-Claude Biver planted his mechanical banner in the sand.

Yay! Things of five.

Wasn't Oris also associated mostly with low cost pin lever watches during the 60s and 70s? (A bit like Timex, I suppose, which was my first watch in 1970 or so.)

[tribe125]

Wasn't Oris also associated mostly with low cost pin lever watches during the 60s and 70s?

It was, and it was the subject of an earlier thing:

• For thirty-two years, Oris was prevented by law from improving the quality of their watches. They wanted to switch to lever escapements but the ‘Watch Statute’ of 1934 said that new technology needed government permission, and permission wasn’t forthcoming. Most Swiss companies had switched to lever escapements before 1934. The Watch Statute was repealed in 1966.

[tribe125]

• Abraham-Louis Breguet was the first to create a guilloché watch dial, but was probably not the first to apply the technique to metal. Breguet learnt of guillochage in London, where it was often used to decorate wooden furniture.
  
  
• While John Harrison was grappling with the construction of marine chronometers in England, Ferdinand Berthoud was doing the same thing in France - and England and France were at war. Berthoud hadn’t been successful, so within weeks of the war ending he headed for London, where Harrison had not long completed the prize-winning H4 of ‘Longitude’ fame. Harrison showed him the H1, H2 and H3, for a fee of £500 (£100,000 today) - but not the H4. Still unsuccessful with his own efforts, Berthoud was back two years later. As before, Harrison refused to show him the H4 but said he could describe it - for a fee of £4,000 (£700,000 today). Harrison was a grumpy Englishman, Berthoud was French, so Berthoud had to find his own way of making a marine chronometer - which ultimately, he did.
  
  
• Captain Cook didn’t wear a Rado, and for his first expedition he didn’t have a marine chronometer, even though they had been invented seven years earlier. There was still only one in existence, and the Board of Longitude didn’t want to risk it on such a perilous voyage. Put bluntly, Harrison’s H4 chronometer was more valuable than Captain Cook and the other ninety-four people on board the Endeavour. Fortunately, James Cook may have been the greatest navigator of all time. Some of his navigational fixes from the late 1700s were found to be accurate within metres when later checked against GPS.
  
  
• In the early 1960’s, the sub-dials of the Heuer Carrera, Omega Speedmaster and Rolex Daytona were identical because all three dials were made by Singer.
  
  
• To settle all possible debate, the Seiko Spring Drive is a mechanical movement electronically improved.