Ticking Along Nicely

We often come across watches with inscriptions, and find they can be difficult to sell, especially if the text is personal in nature. ‘To Bert with all my love Ethel’ is unlikely to excite many collectors into parting with their hard earned so we either price accordingly or often get the inscription removed by lathing the caseback.   

This nice Longines Automatic came to us last year through one of our usual trade sources and we listed the watch for sale in the usual way.  We obviously noticed it had an inscription but didn’t look any further into it.   It was factual in nature with no expressions of undying love, and on a more technical level engraved in gold fill, so impossible to remove.

Once up for sale, one of our regular customers emailed us to say he suspected the inscription had some significance. In particular, that Albert Edward Johnson, was an American poet and Associate Professor of English, Syracuse University, New York City. 

Intrigued by this revelation I investigated further and wrote to Syracuse University asking whether they could confirm what we believed.

This is the reply I received:

Your inquiry, sent to Syracuse University Alumni Relations, was forwarded to Syracuse University Archives for further research. 

Quoting from one of his obituaries in October 1960:  “Albert Edward Johnson was London born and went to Canada when he was 14.  Graduated from Saskatchewan University he then entered the service with the 11^th Canadian Field Ambulance during WW I.  He studied at Edinburgh University, received his Master of Arts degree from Saskatchewan University in 1920 and then served as lecturer at the University of Manitoba until 1924 when he came to Syracuse University.

 “Here he taught modern drama, forms and art of poetry, creative writing and a survey course in English Literature and quickly became a part of the community, where his quick wit, literary knowledge and deep sense of beauty contributed much to the city’s cultural life.” 

Prof. Johnson was named the first Syracuse University Poet-in-Residence for the year 1954-1955.  He retired in 1956 after 32 on the faculty of Syracuse University.  He and his wife Catherine left Syracuse to live in Majorca.  However, when he became ill he returned to England for treatment and died in London on September 28, 1960.

I did not find any specific mention of a watch presentation.  However, an article in the local Post-Standard newspaper mentions a surprise farewell tribute given in his honor on May 22, 1956 where representatives of the University and the City of Syracuse paid tribute to him.  This sounds like a potential watch giving occasion. 

If you need any other information, please do not hesitate to let me know. 

Sincerely, Mary O’Brien

Assistant Archivist

     

     

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Some further googling unearthed this article:  

 

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Prof. Johnson wins Award with Coronation Book.

Prof. A.E. Johnson of the English department at Syracuse University won thrid prize in the poetry section of the Books of the Month Coronation Literary Competition with his book, “The Crown and The Laurel.”. This was a worldwide competition judged by the professor of poetry at Oxford University, C Day Lewis. Publication of the book George Ronald has made news in production circles. The book jacket and book binding for thise coronation poems were printed at the same time and in the same design.

Printed offset-lithographed, the cover of this book looks just as gay and inviting in yellow, white and black as it did before the jacket was removed.

In a trade publication this point is thought out: “Why do publishers spend so much money on four and five-color dust jackets which cover drab cased bindings? These can give rise to a sense of loss and disappointment when, eventually, the jacket has to be discarded”.

Prof. Johnson has created a graceful tribute to the young poetry. In “The Crown and the Laurel”, the name and themes of Shakespeare are constantly recurring symbols. Nearly half the poems are about or reminiscent of the man from Stratford.

Prof. Johnson’s poetry has been published in The New York Times, Punch Magazine, the Poetry Review, The Christian Science Monitor and the Post Standard. He is vice-president of the English Speaking union in Syracuse.

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Prof. AE Johnson published several volumes of verse between 1925 and 1953 in both the UK and USA, not a major celebrity but a significant character in English Literature during this period.

We hope the watch goes somewhere where it’s interesting provenance can be appreciated.  Meanwhile I shall be found researching all our current watches with inscriptions making sure I’ve haven’t missed anything!  

You can view and purchase the watch on our site, here

http://www.poshtime.co.uk/bigpic2.php?id=410.009&st=SELLNEW 

 

Well if you have been on another planet for the last 5 years you might have failed to notice that the world seems to have undergone a widescreen revolution.  I couldn’t tell you who is responsible for the move but some unknown force has been surreptitiously replacing our standard 4:3 ratio screens with 16:9 items.  I’m not sure it’s even possible to purchase a 4:3 TV anymore and camcorders, laptops and monitors are all following type.  Thinking aloud though, I can’t help thinking John Logie Baird made some monumental cock-up in the original design of the TV set which has since taken 80 years to resolve. 

My theory is compounded by the revelation that some of his other inventions were not altogether successful. In his twenties he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite and shorted out Glasgow’s electricity supply. Later Baird perfected a glass razor which was rust-resistant, but shattered. Inspired by pneumatic tyres he attempted to make pneumatic shoes, but his prototype contained semi-inflated balloons which burst. He also invented a thermal undersock (the Baird undersock), which was moderately successful. Baird suffered from cold feet, and after a number of trials, he found that an extra layer of cotton inside the sock provided warmth.  I may just have been able to give him the heads up on that one.

I’m sure he would have appreciated my current 42″ widescreen plasma, (in the required 16:9 format of course) which not only would have left him dumbstruck, but with a power rating of 300w would have nicely kept his feet warm if he had cared to sit within a few feet of the screen.

 But what we have clearly forgotten is that the watchmakers of the 1970’s beat the electronics giants to it.  ‘Widescreen’ watches were more popular than the Morecambe and Wise christmas special.  

This beauty, a 1970’s Nivada Antares is typical, now for sale on our site.  Aesthetics aside, the time, of course is no easier to read, but in pure engineering terms the large case design makes better use of the lateral space available on your wrist.  Oscar Wilde quoted that “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that it has to be altered every 6 months”, and throughout the 80’s and 90’s you wouldn’t have been able to wear one for fear of the fashion police being called.  Thirty or so years later, these mega styled timepieces are all the rage again with Vintage Omega Dynamics (more oval than 16:9 granted) fetching the price of a new 42″ plasma.    

I wonder what John Logie Baird would have made of it all.

Following another successful years trading and a rush on Omegas and Rolexes of late, we’ve been left with rather embarrassingly low stock levels.  Vintage Rolexes and Omegas in particular are proving ever harder to ‘get in’ at the right price and there is also a lot of rubbish out there, generally the Ebay fallout, which we will not compromise our standards to sell on the site.  Please bear with us, we hope to remedy the situtation over the coming months. 

For years it seems I have been labouring under the misconception that London is an evil place full of smoke, traffic, rip-off merchants and vagrants.   This is all still there of course, but on my first visit for many years I found beneath the stereotypes some fulfilment for the soul.  Hundreds of years of history, stunning architecture, some of the finest food and wine available anywhere in the world, which of course it would have been rude not to partake in. Then, of course there’s the conspicuous display of consumption in all things material.  Of particular interest to me of course were the fine watches and cars in every direction of our designated base, namely London’s premier Mayfair district.

I got bored counting the ubiquitous Porsches and Range Rovers and found my tastes quickly attuned to more exotic finery, Lamborghini Murcielago, Ferrari 550, Maserati Granturismo and more than a smattering of the latest models from Rolls Royce. In the watch arena I was reminded just how expensive new Omegas are now (£3250 for the CoAxial Moonwatch) and how beautiful the styling is on modern Cartier.

In the hangover from the ‘bankers bonus’ era, it’s refreshing to find that in Central London at least there is no such thing as a credit crunch. The sound of Harrod’s tills was ringing louder than Alastair Darling’s national debt alarm and the restaurants and bars were busier than Gordon Brown’s PR consultant.  

My Dad being being somewhat of an amateur social commentator, has many theories on the future of mankind. One of his more well developed musings, centres around the fragility of digital media and the risk of mankind losing an entire tome of information that will never be recovered.   The problem is we have staked our belief in digital storage to such an extent that we have forsaken hard tangible copies of our most important records.  The digital camera revolution means all those personal memories are now stored on memory cards, hard drives and servers around the world, instead of in dusty shoeboxes under the bed. Surely safer now? Well my Dad for one isn’t convinced.

In Mum and Dad’s drawer at home is a Cine 8 Film of their wedding day in 1968.  The last time it was viewed was probably 1969 when Cine 8 projectors were present in probably 0.05% of people’s home rather than confined to Visual Arts museums as they would be today.  He could have course converted it to video, but then we had a choice of Betamax, then VHS. Fifteen years later it would then have to be converted again to DVD and would sometime around now be a candidate for conversion to Mpeg, Quicktime or even Blu-ray.  Such organised multiple format conversion antics, need an Olympic athlete level of discipline to undertake and it does seem rather OTT given that photos, well wisher’s cards, and other ephemera have survived intact without so much as a casual encounter with a jpeg, SD card or 500Gb SATA drive.

My Dad’s theory goes that all important records of our age will be lost through a combination of failure to convert to the format of the day, media and hardware failure.   Imagine the generations 500 years hence, theorising on what life was like at the turn of the millenium, and how they actually had more information about life during the Stone Age.  Judging by the quality of anything we build these days, there certainly won’t be any buildings or other man made objects to give them much of a clue.

Then there are all those that are throwing out their LPs and CDs in favour of 192Kbps encoded MP3s.  Not only is the tangible ownership of a record gone, a big chunk of the sound quality has too, although no one seems to care or notice.  The smart money is on the collectors who are busy squirrelling away those first pressings of Beatles Classics, or in my more esoteric case, an original 1974 issue of Stormbringer by Deep Purple. That’s if the damp and mice in the loft haven’t destroyed it first, which is of course the other side of the argument.   

Consideration for how long your collectables will last is very important and it worries me deeply that watch collectors are pouring thousands into large collections of early LED and electric transition watches only to find the coils rot away and transistors go open circuit, rendering them beyond repair and worthless.  I recently found a cracking Seamaster F300 for no money at all and was delighted when it purred into life after fitting a fresh battery.  Only 3 months later it is now as dead as Monty Python’s proverbial parrot for no apparent reason, with an imminent recovery as likely as Gordon Brown’s green shoots.  An early Bulova Quartz complete with it’s original box also died alone in the dark, in my safe last year, in very similar circumstances.

I’m not so keen on buying too many more watches like this and will stick to investing in technology thats proved to last a 100 years or so.  Whether I religiously start printing out my digital photos and storing them under the bed in that shoebox is another matter.

I somehow doubt future mankind will learn much.

I’ve recently taken possession of a very tidy Omega Speedmaster Professional otherwise known as the ‘Moon Watch’.  During my usual inspection of the movement, my typically dour disposition was sowewhat lifted by the revelation that the manufacture date was the same year as my birthday, 1970.   The date also has rather more important significance to mankind in that, while I was being ushered into the world, Jack Swigert, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise were fighting for survival during their ill-fated excursion to the moon.  The history books state that the Speedmaster was used to time the critical course correction ‘burn’ to send them back to earth, although much hay has been made by conspiracists, fuelled notably from a misconstrued quote from  “The Best of Times: Rolex, an unauthorized History“, (Dowling and Hess) leading many to believe (mostly Rolex officionados) that Jack Swigert’s Rolex GMT was used for the task.    Chuck Maddox wrote a great essay on the subject which was certainly enough to convince me of the true facts surrounding the event.  The internet is an amazing place but where a million voices have replaced one, it becomes rather more dificult to discern the truth from fiction.  Scarily, there are still people out there making a living from attempting to convince the world that we never went to the moon at all, let alone the anal rumblings over which watch was used at the time.    

The story of how the watch was selected for the space programme and how it eventually came to be the ‘first watch worn on the moon’ during the Apollo 12 moon landing is just as fascinating.  As a company director of a small water engineering consultancy, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with the astonishingly bureaucratic and slow procurement processes most large organisations employ in buying new goods and services.  I’m sure you would expect a government organisation like NASA to undertake the highest standards of evaluation, re-evaluation and other mind-bendingly protracted quality system processes to seeking a supplier for a watch for their space missions.  Not so, in fact NASA back in 1961, realising that they were running short of time in the race for space, sent a buyer for flight equipment, incognito, to ‘Corrigan’s’ watch shop in Houston, Texas to purchase five chronographs for testing purposes, all of different brands including the Omega Speedmaster.  The Speedmaster has been in production since 1957. It was never designed or modified by NASA (contrary to some folklore) and in fact, Omega were completely unaware of NASA’s intended use of the watch until much later. 

NASA’s engineers subjected the watches to various ’torture’ tests in order to simulate the conditions found in space.  Exposure to extreme heat, cooling, vibration and vacuum were all evaluated with the result being that only the Omega Speedmaster passed all the tests.  This lead to the watch being ‘Flight Qualified’ and it’s eventual use on the moon.  In a slight twist of fate, it wasn’t actually my namesake, Neil Armstrong’s Speedmaster that first landed on the moon. A problem had developed with the lunar craft’s timer which resulted in Armstrong’s ’Speedy’ being used as a backup device.  It wasn’t until Buzz Aldrin stepped on to the surface that the Speedmaster’s glory was sealed.

The Speedmaster continued to support the space programme for many years, with no revision other than to have the moniker ‘Professional’ added by Omega following it’s NASA endorsement.  It was even adopted by Russia’s cosmonauts and also fought off some very aggressive political lobbying to have ‘All American’ products (notably Bulova) supporting the space programme.   Post ‘69 models celebrated the lunar landing event with the caseback being inscribed ‘The first Watch worn on the moon’.  Omega extended their claim further later on to say ‘the First and ONLY watch worn on the moon’.  This statement was however proved incorrect when Apollo XV Astronaut David Scott testified to wearing a Waltham chronograph on the moon when the crystal of his Omega had ‘popped off’.

So the next time you find yourself in charge of a procurement project, just check your local supplier doesn’t have what you are looking for, in stock before spending millions reinventing the wheel!

As for my new Speedy, I doubt it will be asked to provide service in no more pressing an environment than the office, where temperatures can readily vary between an extreme 15 and 20deg C, and the only risk of serious impact is from me banging my fists on the table in frustration at those bureaucratic company buyers. 

We are often asked, whether a particular vintage piece is suitable for everyday wear.  The answer to that is not quite as straight forward as it may seem and it really boils down to what compromises you are prepared to make for your timepiece.

At the same time as getting into vintage watches, I was working as a sales consultant for a software firm in the water industry.  This involved a fair degree of international travel, and inevitably the need to catch flights at certain times etc.,  Any person of average intelligence would have sensibly concluded that an accurate, robust and reliable timepiece would have been an essential accesory for such missions. Sadly, such practical considerations have often eluded me, and I would occasionally find myself either en-route to an airport or waiting in the departure lounge, staring at the face of whatever watch I was wearing, wondering why the hands weren’t moving. Luckily, unless you are undertaking regular commutes to un-inhabited climes, there is usually a secondary source of timekeeping, often more accurate too. 

One reasonable analogy is drawing parallels to classic car ownership.  It would take a very brave and committed individual to drive upwards of 15,000 miles per annum in a 1969 MGB Roadster.  Not only would they need the constitution of an ox to resist the assault on your senses, particulary at motorway speeds, but its likely they would be on first name terms with most of the AA patrol members in the country.   Nevertheless, there are people are out there that are prepared to make such commitments to their hobbies or interests, even claiming to be enjoying the experience. 

Wearing a vintage watch everyday is somewhat less demanding but some of the same principles remain.  At a basic level a manually wound watch needs winding every single day.  Not such a big deal I hear you cry, but I can barely remember to get up every day and if you forget to wind, you can be left wondering why its suddenly got dark at 2pm in the afternoon.    Then there is the water resistance to worry about;  Waterproof watches are a fairly recent phenomenom in the timeline of horology, but we seem to forget that complex mechanical devices don’t like to be used in the rain or washing the car, or heaven forbid used in the sea.   I can still remember the wince I gave reading an email where a customer asked me if the vintage 1960s diving watch I was selling was still capable of active service.  I think my reply was courteous, but it may have included a sarcastic reference to using a 1960s diving regulator.

The biggest threat to all mechanical timepieces is shock. The watch industry collectively found a number of reasonable solutions (Incabloc, KIF etc.) but again not until the late 1930s and even then, shock protection wasn’t de rigeur until much later.  Dropping a non shock protected watch to a hard floor, will break a balance staff pivot rendering the watch terminally broken, save from the rescuing hands of the most skilled watchmakers. 

 So after such ramblings the answer really is, Yes, its all perfectly possible but be reasonable and be prepared to make some sacrifices for your timepiece like taking it off when fixing the car or doing the washing up.

The most sensible suggestion of course is to have an army of vintage watches to share the load and a £5 rubber Casio for those moments where you can find yourself up to your arms in paint, concrete or if you have problems with drains, something much worse. 

If you really want to use a single vintage watch every day then make sure a) its shock protected b) have it serviced regularly  and c) you are very careful with it.   Barring an unfortunate accident, there is nothing that should prevent the said watch outliving your own time, and being available for the next generation.

This morning I was in fear of being caught attending a local Business Link seminar on ‘Making your business sustainable and lowering your carbon footprint’.  It started well but descended rapidly into a cringeworthy scene from a Mike Leigh play.  Like a local AA meeting, we were all forced to gather in small groups and confront our sins, “Hello, my name’s Robin Armstrong and I’ve harmed the environment”. 

The problem is I despise ’Green’ policy, not because I don’t believe that we should all think more about the impact we having on the planet, but because it’s been hijacked by every marketing guru, politician and local council as an opportunity to sell us something we don’t need or want, raise taxes or in the case of the council, provide a licence for legalised extortion.   I wonder, at what point during the formative years of climate change experts developing their theories of world doom, did someone realise that they were about to witness the birth of the biggest growth industry that the world has ever seen.  Of course the issue now is that so many jobs, companies, politicians careers and half of the world’s finances are staked on the belief that the world is doomed unless we change our behaviour, that even if someone could categorically prove it’s all nonsense (which is highly likely), the rollercoaster could no longer be stopped. 

Well, who am I to buck the trend.?  It seems despite my resistance to be swayed by ‘Green’ loony rhetoric , I’m actually more green than I thought.  Not only am I currently employed as a Director of a Water Engineering consultancy, concerned with saving water and energy for water utilities, I also find myself as a watch dealer of mechanical timepieces, devices with a seemingly negligible carbon footprint.

Some 45 and often many more years ago, while the rest of the world was busy carving up forests, building 9 lane carriageways across continents, powerstations, and oil refineries the size of small towns, white coated Swiss Technicians were building the watches I now sell, mechanical marvels fashioned by small machines, hand tools and a very keen eye.  The minimal carbon impact of their production has been written off over many years service. They require no batteries with hazardous material which will end up in landfill, and emit no gases that will heat the earth up.

I just hope that whilst our attention has been diverted to saving the planet from ourselves, there are sufficient industry professionals left, keeping a look out for those more relevant issues like, ensuring the world has enough food and energy, and keeping a look out for that mass extinction comet heading our way.

That would be a strange irony.  

I was recently reminded of the occasion, 2 years ago,  when we had our wrists metaphorically slapped for inadvertently abusing one of Cartier’s trademarks.  Contrary to my own, and popular belief, it appears the published use of the most innocuous of words can render copyright lawyers into a frenzy of litigious fervour.

On this occasion the offending noun was ‘tank’, in most people’s eyes a large green metal box with a large gun sticking it out of it, running on caterpillar tracks.  Cartier’s use of the word originates from the same source, namely, Louis Cartier’s inspiration on seeing the tough new war machine the Americans introduced to the fighting in Europe during the First World War.  The ‘Tank’ wristwatch was introduced in 1917, and became Cartier’s most famous model, a rugged yet beautiful watch that became a classic. Somewhere in the distant past they managed to persuade whatever trademark body was in force, that only they, had rights to use the word in connection with watches.

Unfortunately, due in part to my ignorance on such legal matters, it appeared we had inadvertently applied the same moniker to other rectangular shaped watches from other watch marques.  We were informed of this by a rather stiffly worded letter from Cartier’s lawyers, and instructed to desist use of the word ‘Tank’ in any other watch related context, unless we were describing Cartier’s own watches, obviously. 

We duly complied of course.

Back in 1996 Jeremy Clarkson wrote an amusing article in ‘Clarkson on Cars’ comparing the vagaries of Breitling ownership, with a modern Casio.   In his Sunday Times column more recently, he also announced that he was ‘calling time on silly watches’, although this assertion seems to have fallen by the wayside, if the Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean seen on his wrist during recent episodes of Top Gear, is anything to go by.  For 90% of the population, a modern quartz watch is a perfectly acceptable tool. Its reliable, stunningly accurate, and operates by stealth, quietly functioning in all manner of environmental conditions until the battery finally runs out after 5 years or so.

For me, and the remaining 10% of the population, owning a single reliable modern quartz watch is rather like holidaying every year in Dorset, in the same week in June.  The experience eventually becomes so innocuous, that the prospect of staying at home and not going on holiday at all becomes a prospect of seemingly dangerous excitement.   Unfortunately, as Clarkson intimated, there is no doubt that Quality and Reliability make uncomfortable bed fellows.   

Some of you may know that I own a 1992 Mercedes 500SL, a car not only of ridiculous complication but probably one of the finest expressions of automotive build quality.  It’s original price tag of £75,000 is testament to the sheer time and effort taken by disciplined, white coated Germans in it’s production.  Despite it’s obvious pedigree, it is the singularly most unreliable car I’ve owned.   A short trip, undertaken without one of the myriad of dashboard warning lights blinking at you is considered a success of Olympic medal proportions, to be congratulated by a pat on the bonnet or perhaps a celebratory wash and polish at the weekend.  The ignition system has developed its own water production plant which I plan to patent and market to arrid Arab states. This results in a distributor cap clean every 1000 miles, to dry out the electrics and restore some semblance of teutonic efficiency to its unfeasibly refined 5.0l V8. 

The folding roof mechanism is a work of engineering genius, combining motors, solenoids, hydraulic rams and accompanying electronic wizardry to make it all work in perfect sequence.  The problem is everytime I press the button to lower the roof I wince, just like when you visit the dentist and you await the verdict on the state of your teeth.  It’s this expectation of failure that somehow makes the experience, when all is working, so much more memorable. 

In short, I won’t be trading the Mercedes for a Ford Mondeo, nor will I be trading the Omega for a Casio…