Five Things

[Samanator]

[LIST][*]When the Offshore model was first launched, Gérald Genta invaded the booth shouting that his Royal Oak had been completely destroyed.]

This make complete sense to me since I really can’t stand any Genta designs, but I’m starting to really like the Offshore Model primarily the funky color ones.



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[crownpuller]

That Tiffany looks nasty...

I concur.

Can't really blame Tiffany for not being too keen on that design.

Was anyone ?... Did it sell ?
Personally, I dislike pretty much everything about it.

[tribe125]

• When introduced, the steel-cased Royal Oak was more expensive than a gold-cased Patek Philippe dress watch, and more than ten times more expensive than a Rolex Submariner.

• Early Rolex watches were made by Aegler in Bienne. Hans Wilsdorf asked Aegler to use the new ‘Rolex’ trademark on all the watches made for Rolex. Aegler was not then an exclusive supplier to Rolex but reluctantly agreed. Aegler came to be known as Rolex Bienne. Rolex was two separate companies until 2004 when the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation purchased Rolex Bienne, thereby uniting it with Rolex Genève.

• Rolf Schnyder, visionary owner of Ulysses Nardin and the man responsible for The Freak, was the first to make Swiss watch components in Asia. His Thailand factory opened in 1968, and he later built a watch case factory in Manila and a watch dial factory in Kuala Lumpur. The components were exported to Switzerland. Schnyder learned that Ulysses Nardin was for sale while competing in the Cresta Run in 1983.

• Horological articles often say that the pantograph was invented in 1839 by Georges-Auguste Leschot, the technical director of Vacheron Constantin. It wasn’t. Leschot used a pantograph mechanism to make a machine that could manufacture identical parts, signalling the end of the hand-made era. He called it the (capital ‘P’) Pantograph. Vacheron Constantin, now a byword for tradition and heritage, was the world's first industrial producer of watches. Pantograph devices are still used by artisan watchmakers - a milling tip at the ‘small’ end, a large template at the ‘big’ end.

• For forty-five percent of its life the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso has been out of production. Introduced in 1931, it soon became old-fashioned and was withdrawn in 1943. It was reintroduced with a quartz movement in 1982.

[TJMike5150]

I never knew the Reverso was out of production, yet alone for so long.


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[tribe125]

It’s part of the marketing success of the Swiss watch industry that we see the history of brands and models as a kind of noble procession. The reality is often far more shambolic and haphazard. Brilliant men like Nicolas Hayek and Jean-Claude Biver are partly responsible, but it’s also what we want to see. The industry is as fascinating as the things we strap on our wrists, and of course the two can’t be divided.

[TJMike5150]

Plato’s Noble Lie sums up the “history” of the Swiss watch industry.


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[mlcor]

• Rolf Schnyder, visionary owner of Ulysses Nardin and the man responsible for The Freak, was the first to make Swiss watch components in Asia. His Thailand factory opened in 1968, and he later built a watch case factory in Manila and a watch dial factory in Kuala Lumpur. The components were exported to Switzerland. Schnyder learned that Ulysses Nardin was for sale while competing in the Cresta Run in 1983.

I thought Ludwig Oechslin designed the Freak; live and learn.

[tribe125]

I thought Ludwig Oechslin designed the Freak.

He did. Schnyder was responsible in the sense of having the vision to commission it from Oechslin.

[tribe125]

A bit more here -

“The project was something of a salvage mission, Oechslin recalls. Ulysse Nardin had planned to bring out a watch using a movement design by the watchmaker Carole Forestier-Kasapi, now head of movement development at Cartier, who worked for Ulysse Nardin and Renaud et Papi before taking her present job. But the movement as Forestier-Kasapi designed it was impracticable. Oechslin looked at it and decided that its basic principle, that of a rotating movement, could work if it were executed differently. He increased the movement-rotation speed slightly, to once per hour, and used the escapement bridge to indicate the minutes and the mainspring barrel, which rotates once every 12 hours, to indicate the hour.”

[tribe125]

• There was once a resistance to paying a lot of money for a Swiss watch because ‘Swiss’ meant low quality. It’s part of the reason for Rolex being established in England (with the watches distributed from England), even though the watches were produced in Switzerland. Today, you could probably substitute China for Switzerland and Switzerland for England.

• The Patek Philippe Calatrava is named after the company’s brand logo, the Calatrava cross. Antoni Patek was a devout Catholic, which may have led him to choose the cross of a ‘fighting’ religious order that held Calatrava castle against the Muslims. Calatrava is in Castile and the word comes from the Arabic Qalʿat Rabāḥ (Fortress of Rabah).

• 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.

• Citizen has Swiss origins. Protectionist tariffs in Japan could be circumvented by importing watches in kit form. Rodolphe Schmid, a Swiss trader based in Japan, imported components from his Swiss factory but later transferred production to Japan. He adopted the Citizen brand name in 1918. The protectionist tariffs were a result of political manoeuvering by Seiko, but that’s another story.

• Omega executives wanted to sell the company to the Japanese, who had offered to buy it. Failing that, they thought they should go downmarket and compete with Citizen and Seiko. This was in the early days of SMH (precursor to the Swatch Group). Nicolas Hayek later fired a number of Omega executives.