By 1935, Movado’s first FB-cased, water-resistant line of watches, the Acvatic, was released. At a time when manual-wind watches were the norm, the brands all recognised the case’s commercial potential and placed their orders.
Together, this combination significantly increased water resistance of the case without the need for a screw-down crown.Įarly in the decade, FB built prototypes incorporating these patents and presented them to a number of brands, including Movado, Doxa, Mido, and Patek Philippe. In the early 1930s, one such case maker, François Borgel (FB), had recently patented the cork stem seal (patent CH 130942 of 1928) and decagonally-shaped, screw-down case back (CH 156807 of 1931). While final products were modified to brand specifications, family traits are easily discernible across marques that shared suppliers. Specialists manufactured the case, dial, or ebauche (movement blank), and peddled their wares to as many brands as possible. Until the 21st century, Swiss watch production was predominantly a cottage industry. Today, we’ll peer into with what many consider the pinnacle of Movado collecting, its exceptionally-cased midcentury chronographs. Using their ballast - no, I haven’t run out of nautical metaphors yet - we hope to fathom yet further. Midcentury Movado chronographs lie squarely at those depths let’s dive in.Īs we arrive at the door of our submersible, we must first acknowledge those who have assembled taxonomies of this scantly-explored abyss: the late Fritz van Osterhausen, author of The Movado History, and the excellent M95 chronograph reference the e-newsletter Rescapement published a few years ago. While the details of vintage Patek Philippe and Rolex have been mapped down to their going trains, numerous brands remain relatively uncharted – a Marianas Trench’s of knowledge awaiting exploration. As most tropes go, they are as annoying as they are true, and in this case they’re also an apt metaphor for vintage watch knowledge. Facebook Linkedin Twitter Pinterest Weibo Mail InstagramĮvery time you read a story about the ocean, there’s a good chance you’ll see that it is “95% unexplored”, or “we know more about the surface of the moon than of the seafloor”.
0 kommentar(er)
