And what did you buy today ?

[Matt]

Here’s the text of the article. It’s on Collectability.com -


PATEK PHILIPPE MYTH BUSTERS: DID DAVID PENNEY REALLY DESIGN THE REF. 96?

JOHN REARDON


There are endless “facts” that people believe as true and are endlessly parroted, copied, and retold until people simply accept them as fact. For example, can you see the Great Wall of China from space? (Actually, no) Do you need to let your kids wait an hour after eating before swimming? (Actually, no) Do toilets flush in different direction in the northern and southern hemispheres? (Actually, no) And my personal horological favorite, did David Penney design the Patek Philippe ref. 96? (Actually, no!).

It is interesting to note that Penney’s drawing features a hobnail bezel.

This myth that David Penney designed the ref. 96 needs to be debunked immediately and forever deleted from the internet. Even Wikipedia, unfortunately the first stop of most ‘research’ articles in our modern world, states the ‘fact’ that Penney designed the ref. 96. But what does Wikipedia source? Who is David Penney? What is the real story?


The Myth:

Englishman and horologist David Penney designed the ref. 96 that was launched in the early 1930s and he helped save Patek Philippe from economic disaster in the Great Depression.


The Truth:

An Englishman did not save Patek Philippe from the perils of the Great Depression, especially as the gentleman in question was not yet born! David Penney is a very respected antiquarian horologist and illustrator, working for over five decades in the industry, David Penny is alive and well in the U.K. and you can find his site here.


The Disconnect:

The problem online is that dozens of ‘sources’ on the internet make the bold claim that Penney designed the ref. 96. So what happened and how did this untruth become accepted as fact? When I was recently asked by a collector friend if David Penney designed the ref. 96 in the 1930s, I said, “absolutely no way is that possible” and my collector friend reacted as if I just made a statement akin to insisting the world was flat. So, to confirm my belief I reached out to David Penney directly to ask if he had ever heard of the rumor that he designed the ref. 96 and if he had any idea how the rumor was started. Within minutes, Mr. Penney kindly responded and set the record straight:

“You are welcome to try and debunk this myth. I have been contacted before about this and tell everyone the same story, which is: I am, or rather was, a full-time illustrator. I designed and provided the endpapers for Patek’s 1982 pocket watch book for the authors, Martin Huber and Alan Banbery. After its success, I was then asked by the authors to design the cover and provide the endpapers for their 1988 wristwatch book. During production, much of which was controlled by the late Christian Pfeiffer-Belli, I was asked to also create a series of ’non-technical’ images to celebrate some of Patek’s classic models. I was told they were to be used as chapter openers and would be used at quarter page size.”

So thanks to Mr. Penney we can start to see where the mistake was made. Someone, perhaps a journalist who glanced at the bible of all things Patek Philippe, the Huber & Banbery book, mistook Penney’s drawings as original concept drawings of the ref. 96.

David Penney continues confirming this major plot point:

“At some point, someone thought they were design drawings, and then their mistake was copied, and so on… They are not design drawings but were done solely to celebrate the original models, the designers of which I do not know.”

So, there you have it, Penney did not design the ref. 96 and the name of the original designer of the seminal time only reference is lost to history.

The thing is that it was far from seminal. There were few people putting such posh movements into wristlets at that period, but that shape of the watch had been slowly evolving since the first world war. As I understand it, it wasn't even Bauhaus as it violates the fundamental rule that form follows function without any compromise - as such a Bauhaus design would be more like this:

With lugs that did the job required of them and no more while, to my uneducated eye, limning what looks pretty close to a golden rectangle into the lug positioning - but I'm not measuring at this time of the morning so I'm wide open to corrections. Either way, somewhere in my junk I have a battered little 29mm silver watch with a 1919 hallmark that looks pretty well identical to the original ref 96 - that's pre Bauhaus and I don't think it's much of an exception.