Five Things

[tribe125]

These are great. Where did the Patek story come from? That would be entertaining to look up. There are a few similar anecdotes in the last chapters of Stacy Perman's "A Grand Complication".

It was from an interview with the Patek man in question, combined with recollections of a Patek collector. I don’t remember the names.

There is also a story about a collector who didn’t have the money to match his winning bid and committed suicide a week or two later. I thought I had made that one into a thing as well, but looking ahead I can’t find it. I didn’t get the impression that the two stories were describing the same event.

[Strela167]

• People are more likely to keep a Grand Seiko for life than an Audemars Piguet. Five times more likely - if you can believe statistics drawn from Chrono24. Both companies produce around 40,000 watches a year, and there will usually be several thousand APs for sale, but only a few hundred Grand Seikos. There will be many factors at play, but the disparity is marked, and it could indicate a fundamental difference in owner attitudes and behaviour.
• The SBS are like the SAS, but in small rubbery boats, and they used to be issued with Rolex Submariners. When not sneaking around in places where they’re not meant to be, the SBS are based in Poole Harbour in Dorset, from where they’ve been known to sail out and practice their skills with a hostile boarding of the passenger ferry from Cherbourg. One day, landing on a Dorset beach in a heavy swell, an SBS soldier noticed that the bezel had fallen off his MilSub. Taking his broken watch to the stores, he was told: “Here, take this one, it’s better”, and was handed a CWC. The SBS later asked that their quartz CWCs were made with black cases, and with a day and date. Issued examples, with the black coating slightly worn, have a unique appeal. You might not want to add your own signs of wear, by being careless when pruning the roses.
• Vintage Pateks didn’t always cost a fortune, until Patek began buying them for their museum. They weren’t cheap, but collectors were accustomed to getting them for sensible money. One day, a collector found that there was only one other bidder in the room, and he was confident that he could see them off. The bidding went up and up, and eventually the collector began to suspect that the other bidder was Patek Philippe. Annoyed at the way that Patek was inflating prices, he thought he’d make them pay. The bidding went up and up, far beyond the collector’s limit. And then the man from Patek thought: “This is too much, even for us”, and pulled out. The collector, ashen-faced, left the room and made his way unsteadily to the auctioneer’s office.
• When did the RAF have an ‘RAF pattern’ NATO? Never. The RAF had a simple one-piece strap in 1945, but the army had it too, and it was made from canvas webbing. They had another one in 1948, but that was also made from webbing, and it was a standardised strap for all three branches of the armed services. And then, in 1958, it was the RAF that first adopted a nylon strap with a loop, which came to be known as a NATO when it was given a NATO stock number in 1973. The only strap unique to the RAF was a ‘bund’, with a brown nylon strap fed through a broad leather cuff. So, far from favouring a simple NATO without a loop, the RAF was the pioneer of the standard NATO that had one. The NATO actually goes back to 1908, but that one was leather.
• The makers of the Douglas Skindiver were so confident of their watches being waterproof that they sold them packed in water. Douglas Skindivers were mail-order watches advertised in American magazines. Neil Armstrong had one - or so his brother said when he sold it for $5,500. Maybe it was an unwanted gift that Armstrong couldn’t quite throw away, for fear of offending his brother.

Like the SBS bit , but , walls have ears. Hush , hush , nod wink

Been on a few Cherbourg trips over the years , nuffin, shucks

[tribe125]

Been on a few Cherbourg trips over the years , nuffin, shucks

From what I read, the passengers were informed in advance so that they didn’t panic, thinking that the ship was being hijacked. I don’t know if they still do it.

The things you discover, researching watches.

[mlcor]

Some gems in that batch!

[tribe125]

• Tudor watches were once available with optional upgrades to Rolex movements. Considering that early Tudors had the same cases and other parts as Rolexes, the upgraded Tudors were Rolexes, except for the name. Some Tudor cases even had Rolex reference numbers that had been crossed out. Throughout the period that the Royal Navy was issuing Rolex MilSubs, the French Marine Nationale was just as happy with Tudor MilSubs. Big money for a Rolex or modest money for a Tudor? No other watch company has managed such a precarious balancing act, unless you count Omega and Tissot, joined at the hip since 1930. It might be one of Rolex’s greatest achievements.
  
  
• Audemars Piguet makes no money from restoring old watches, but most other celebrated brands probably do. Family-owned watch companies can do things like that. On the other hand, dissemination of this information (like this) does the company no harm at all.
  
  
• Chanel makes watches for bomb-disposal experts. In all probability it doesn’t, but Bell & Ross marketing material could lead you to believe that it does. It was Sinn that made the Type Démineur (Minesweeper Type) for Bell & Ross, but B&R continues to trade on its associations with ‘tactical’ units, giving the impression that it’s still in the tactical business. Bell & Ross watches are made by G&F Châtelain, which is owned by Chanel, and Chanel has a substantial stake in Bell & Ross. Bell & Ross talked of becoming independent when moving on from Sinn, but it’s a funny kind of independence that involves selling a big chunk of your company to a fashion industry giant that then makes your watches. And as it happens, G&F Châtelain sub-contracts the manufacture of the ETA and Sellita models to local assemblers in La Chaux-de-Fonds. So despite appearances, we can say that it’s unlikely that bomb-disposal experts are wearing quartz watches made by Chanel.
  
  
• Few watch collectors are more influential than Auro Montanari, and he believes that the Swatch was the last real innovation in the history of horology. He owns several, along with the exquisite rarities that you might expect him to have, but hasn’t worn one. By contrast, Michael Hill, one of Saville Row’s sartorial style-setters, says that a Swatch may be worn with classic menswear as a signal that you don't take your clothes - or indeed, yourself - too seriously. The Swatch fits in because it doesn’t compete.
  
  
• Nobody knows who designed the George Nelson Ball Clock, because each of the four people who could have designed it were drunk at the time. George Nelson is pretty sure it wasn’t him. It’s hard to imagine Max Bill forgetting what he’d done the day before, in his orderly and light-filled studio, but in New York things were different. The George Nelson Ball Clock is an iconic piece of 1950s design. From a circular central core, coloured balls shoot out on rods, marking the hours. They could be planets, they could be atoms in a molecular model. The hands have a geometric joie de vivre, and the clock is a prime example of modernism for the masses. The masses bought it, and all around the world there are stylish people who still do. The drunken quartet were all notable designers, and they were fooling about with doodles, sometimes taking each other’s designs to make changes. The cold light of the following day revealed that there was one coherent design amongst the doodles, but nobody could remember who did what. George Nelson thought that Isamu Noguchi might have had done it, “because he has a genius for doing two stupid things and making something extraordinary.” If you want one today, they’re £250, with a diameter of 33 cm.

[Fantasio]

Brilliant.

• Nobody knows who designed the George Nelson Ball Clock, because each of the four people who could have designed it were drunk at the time.

[tribe125]

Rowley Birkin is a bit of a role model for me.

I try to be a little more like him every day.

[Rdenney]

Made me look it up.



Rick “and they say the 70’s was an ugly decade...” Denney

[Rdenney]

If one is going to wear a Swatch with a suit to make a Savile Row style statement, both the suit and the body it’s draped on had better deliver the goods. On most of us, the statement it made, if it made any statement at all, would not be favorable.

That said, replacing the Swatch with, say, a Cartier or Bvlgari (as bona fide high-style alternatives) wouldn’t do any good anyway.

But I’m not Italian.

Rick “known for his ability to look unstylish wearing any watch” Denney

[tribe125]

• Design parallels. Just as the square hand of the IWC Mk11 followed a request by the pilots of the RAF, the snowflake hand of the Tudor Submariner followed a request by the divers of the French Marine Nationale. One enabled improved clarity in a cockpit, the other enabled improved clarity when diving at depth. The Royal Navy didn’t like Mercedes hands either, requesting larger sword hands for their Submariners. The classic Submariner is flawed, according to the military divers of Britain and France, but Comex managed.
  
  
• We’ve all been there. You see a rarity in a shop window, but it’s a bit pricey. You tear yourself away, but keep thinking about it on the way home. You get on with a few chores, all the time convincing yourself that the watch could be sold while you’re thinking about it. Maybe the price is negotiable. You go back to the shop and make an offer, and Breguet’s Marie Antoinette is yours. That’s how it was for Sir David Salomons as he walked through Mayfair on a rainy day in 1917. Salomons later wrote: “To carry a fine Breguet watch is to feel that you have the brains of a genius in your pocket.” It has been suggested that the man who stole the Marie Antoinette in 1983 ultimately took this to heart, prompting him to treat it with inquisitive respect, and to reveal its whereabouts on his deathbed, twenty-one years later.
  
  
• Fewer than one million Patek Philippe watches have been made since the day the company started, and Eric Clapton has owned most of them. One of those things isn’t true, but the other raises the question of whether Patek Philippe is a maker of watches or a maker of dreams. For most, a Patek Philippe is not a watch, whether they have one or not.
  
  
• Tissot nearly made the Swatch in 1971, twelve years before the Swatch, but they messed it up with a mechanical movement. The watch was the Astrolon, and it came after twenty years of research into an all-plastic watch. Or as plastic as possible. The primary objective was to solve the age-old problem of lubrication, which had been bugging watchmakers since the days of Breguet. The movement had fifty-two parts, with just four of them made from metal. The case and dial were transparent, allowing a view of the revolution in motion. Very few were sold, and half a million were scrapped. The public was learning about quartz, and didn’t want a revolutionary watch with one foot in the past. In a way, Tissot had made the Sistem51 forty years before the Sistem51 - with one more part.
  
  
• Vacheron Constantin and Jaeger-LeCoultre once shared the same building. Things weren’t great for VC in 1938. The depression years had seen working hours reduced to eighteen a week, and then to nothing, with workers relying on occasional piece-work. The maker of fine watches for Emperors and Kings was making pocket watches for tram drivers. Demand picked up with the devaluation of the Swiss franc, but the company wasn’t in a fit state to respond. Vacheron Constantin joined SAPIC, which was the holding company for Jaeger-LeCoultre’s manufacturing and distribution companies. JLC made VC components in Le Sentier, VC assembled them in Geneva, and JLC moved its distribution company into VC’s building on the Quai de l'Ile. And that’s the way things stayed until 1965, when Vacheron Constantin was feeling a bit better.