Five Things

[mlcor]

• Golfer Greg Norman used his gold Rolex Submariner for diving until he found that barracudas were attracted to its shiny case and bracelet.

Not sharks?

[tribe125]

Ha! I’d almost forgotten that he was the Great White Shsrk.

[Dan R]

• ...
• Gaining a contract to service the watches of the German army, Helmut Sinn gave his young brand a boost by swapping the original Heuer dials for Sinn dials. Helmut Sinn was a decorated Luftwaffe pilot (in Dornier 17s and Heinkel 111s), a champion rally driver (in a Porsche-powered Volkswagen Beetle) and previously made a living out of selling cuckoo clocks. He was recently retired when he died aged 101. His personal watch was frequently a two-button Hanhart caliber 41 from his war years.

Like this?



If so, I can see why! One of my favorites.

Dan

[tribe125]

Yup - although that’s a later version.

[rfortson]

• Seiko doesn’t make everything in-house. The gongs of the Credor Spring Drive Minute Repeater were made by Myochin, a dynastic clan of master metal workers dating back to the twelfth century. Amongst other things, successive leaders of the Myochin clan have made Samurai armour - and articulated turtles. Seiko stands revealed as a mere assembler of watches...

Okay, so I'm 2/3 of the way through this great thread, but this is the best/funniest thing you've written. And I say that as a full-on Seiko fanboy.

[rfortson]

Oh, and the ‘Texas Timex’ bit. I’m not sure where I came across the expression, but Googling ‘rolex texas timex’ produces a good number of hits - some of them also including the Texas Monthly quote.

Yep, I've heard that for years, well before my watch collecting days, and before I moved to Texas.

[tribe125]

Did I post this before? Not sure...

[rfortson]

Did I post this before? Not sure...

Yep, it was several pages back (just caught up on the thread).

Great reading. Thanks for doing this.

[tribe125]

• Seiko engineers tested the durability of the world’s first quartz watch by playing volleyball for three days.
  
  
• No-one can read the mind of a man long dead, but Ferdinand Adolph Lange may have been as interested in social and economic welfare as watchmaking. Or maybe he used the impoverished state of Glashütte as a means of wangling money out of the Saxon Court in Dresden. Fair-mindedness suggests the former, because he financed roads, bridges and homes for sixty families. He also set up a foundation that insured his workers and gave them a pension. Either way, he trained fifteen basket weavers to make watches, and the rest is history. Walter Lange had a similar outlook when resurrecting the company with Günter Blümlein in 1990. Blümlein would say, “Mr. Lange, you are more for Glashütte than Lange.” For Blümlein, it was about the company, for Walter Lange it was about both.
  
  
• Dating from 1887, ‘Made in Germany’ was originally a designation forced upon Germany by the British. It was intended to denote inferior goods from a country with protectionist trade practices. The British rationale was that Germany had been exporting cheap goods with British-sounding trade names. Being a foreign imposition, Germany wasn’t much interested in defining what ‘Made in Germany’ meant.
  
  
• Walt Disney said the Mickey Mouse watch would never sell. Macy’s department store sold 11,000 on the first day of its release in 1933. The Mickey Mouse watch saved Ingersoll from bankruptcy, so without Mickey there would have been no Timex. Emperor Hirohito of Japan was buried wearing his Mickey Mouse watch and astronaut Gene Cernan took one to the moon. The dial of the Mickey Mouse watch was made of white cardboard and its less than ironclad construction may have contributed to the use of ‘Mickey Mouse’ as a pejorative term.
  
  
• The first Swiss wristwatch in space was a Breitling Navitimer. It was modified, at the request of astronaut Scott Carpenter, to include a 24-hour display on the dial. The watch survived three orbits of the earth, but not splashdown in the Pacific. The water-damaged watch was sent to Breitling for repair - and they lost it. Having agreed that a 24-hour display was a good thing in space, NASA then opted for a watch that didn’t have one, the Omega Speedmaster.

[geoffbot]

A constant stream of excellence. Fascinating stuff. Especially valid from someone not interested in watches, like me.