Watchismo Times: space age

Showing posts with label space age. Show all posts

Friday, December 4, 2009

Watchismo's Top Ten Vintage Plastic Watches

Typically, when you think of plastic watches, you think of Swatch. But back in the sixties and seventies, plastic was still a very cool new medium for products. All of the watches featured here are vintage mechanical timepieces, a few with movements by Jaeger and others with automatic winding mechanisms. But overwhelmingly, they are all interesting designs and truly obscure models that you are likely to never find in a lifetime of collecting.

Above, a simple watch with oversized arrows for hands. The case is a somewhat oblong triangle.

This is by a brand called appropriately "Handcuff", this thing is as large as they come and I first read about it in Pieter Doensen's fantastic (out of print) book "Watch - History of the Modern Wrist Watch". I was lucky enough to meet with Pieter back in 2001 and purchased the exact model used for publication. Thanks again Pieter, it's in a safe place!

Ah, again discovered in the Doensen book, this Record Automatic (by Longines) was an amazing find on Ebay about 8 years ago...brand new in box, unfortunately too small for my wrist, made for women. Probably for the best as I would likely have the balls to wear this in public.

The Helmet Jump Hour, not much to say here other than "look at that friggin movement!". Insane. I featured this a while back-->link

Part of watchmaking history, the Tissot Astrolon Idea 2001, the worlds first all plastic watch, including the movement. For more info, go here-->link

And some of my absolute favorite watches to collect but hardly ever wear, the Pierre Cardin 1971 collection (shown above and below). Produced for just for one year, these fantastic watches had manual winding Jaeger movements and designs (both platic and steel) like no other! For more, go here-->link

The beautiful disc/hand dials of the vintage Mondia Moonstone

The only plastic watch shown here made for kids, featuring gadgets for spying (expandable eyesights, etc) and a manual winding movement with an ingenious display for showing the hour through a rotating hole, for more go here-->link

These plastic watches by Nivada are deceiving, the photos do not express their monster size, they measure approximately 70mm wide! The straps would usually match the dial, for more go here-->link

And for related plastic wristwatch posts...

Monday, July 6, 2009

Eris Planetary Sphere Watch by Pierre Junod - Post Neptunian Object Inspired Swiss Timepiece

Named for the largest known (and newly discoved) dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest body known to orbit the Sun directly, Eris is approximately 2,500 kilometres in diameter and 27% more massive than Pluto. The spherical Eris watch is considerably smaller that that, in fact I broke my calculator trying to determine its 32.2mm percentage of the former planet. Eris would have been our tenth planet if Pluto hadn't been shamed into oblivion.

Either way, this watch, designed by students from l’Ecole d’Arts Appliqués Genèva is a 100 % Swiss made product by Pierre Junod Switzerland and can be worn as a pocket watch, pendant or used as a small desk clock. The Materials are white hour hand & orange minute hand, anthracite anodized aluminum case, laser engraved figures, mineral glass, Swiss quartz movement, each watch is sold with a natural rubber strap to hang from your neck, a wall, anything you wish to have time fly by.

The time is displayed with two pointers (extended from hidden hands) floating around the "equator" of the globe. The minutes indicated on the upper hemisphere and the hours highlighted down below.

Materials:

white hour hand & orange minute hand,
anthracite anodized aluminium case,
laser engraved figures, mineral glass,
swiss quartz movement, each watch is sold with a natural rubber band

Dimensions:
Diameter: 33,2 mm
Thickness: – mm
Weight: 36 g
Battery Ref: Renata swiss made 364

Designer:
EAA Geneva, teachers & students:
Sandy Barbey, Anouck-Eva Meyer, Emmanuelle Taillard

Orange hand (minutes) White hand (hours)

Monday, November 3, 2008

SPACEMAN-TIME CONTINUUM - The Spaceman Watches of 1972-77

All obsessions have their own unique Big Bang and appropriately enough, my compulsive watch collecting was born from these Spaceman watches of the seventies.

Below is an article I wrote for QP Magazine reminiscing about going back to the future with these Spacemen.

TIME-SPACEMAN CONTINUUM - Spaceman Watches of 1972-1977
Leaving New York one chilly winter day, late in 1999, I found myself come unstuck in time and arrive in Basel at the dawn of 1972.

THE UNIVERSE IN A NEUCHÂTEL

My time travel led me to a world filled with hundreds of Spacemen, sitting undisturbed in a Basel watch factory with no plans of visiting the moon anytime soon. This grounded crew was actually a secret stash of vintage Spaceman watches I unearthed at a former distributor of the timepieces designed by Andre LeMarquand, an architect from Neuchâtel . The futuristic watches had fallen out of style during the 80s and 90s but I was ready to fly them out of their dark Swiss graveyard and back onto the wrists of space-age sentimentalists like myself.

In the late sixties Claude Lebet, owner of the Bulle based watch brand Catena asked Le Marquand to create a timepiece inspired by man’s conquest of the moon and the astronauts who made it there. Mr. Le Marquand provided him with his first wristwatch design called, what else, the "Spaceman".

The Spaceman was unlike anything seen before and Catena introduced the fleet at the Basel Fair of 1972. The large oval case appeared to be docked on your wrist held by a triple-forked Corfam strap by DuPont. The case also had a coned dome crystal half concealed by a coloured metal visor that allowed viewing of the dial to only the wearer. All hands and markers were perfectly seventies orange with models in a variety of colours only possible during that special decade.

The watches were powered by automatic and manual winding mechanical ETA movements and were distributed by a variety brands, among them Jules Jurgensen, Fortis, Tressa and Zeno.

Automatic Spaceman Audacieuse

The success led to the development of new Spaceman a few years later, an audacious design by Le Marquand and appropriately named, the "Audacieuse".

THE FINAL FRONTIER

The new Audacieuse was angular yet aerodynamic, looking more like an early miniature prototype of a B2 Stealth Bomber than a watch. The extreme design was square with a hooded dial, similar to the original semi-sideview concept. The straps were oversized and wide as the case itself, available in stainless steel or colored leather. A few very rare models with mechanical jump hour digital displays were also out there and a few quartz-digital "Spacesonic" were produced until the Spaceman series came to an end in 1977. Having completed his mission, the Spaceman stepped aside for the next giant leap in timekeeping – light emitting diodes (LED) and liquid crystal displays (LCD).

1977 LCD "Spacesonic"

My close-encounter with the past was fuelled by reading Pieter Doensen's rare book, "Watch - History of the Modern Wrist Watch". This was been my launch pad to the world of vintage-modern watch design and technology and it has been described as the "the first comprehensive study of the collectible modern wrist watch". Flipping through the book, one can feast their eyes on Richard Arbib's Hamilton Electrics of the fifties & sixties, Roger Tallon's LIP Mach 2000's of the seventies and a multitude of other horological advancements over the past fifty years. But it was the futuristic charm of Andre LeMarquand's Spaceman that first abducted my interests.

SPACEMAN GALLERY

All White Spaceman Audacieuse
(manual winding)

Very Collectible Audacieuse with Lighting Display

Gloss Burgundy Audacieuse

Leather/Woodgrain Audacieuse

Ultra-Rare Tiger Eye Dial Version

Assorted shots of the Audacieuse

VERY RARE Spaceman Jump Hours (above)

Prototype Dynamic Scattering LCD Spacesonic

Inner dial of the Spaceman Oval

Sideviews

On-the-wrist Shots

Brown Oval (Corfam Straps)

Blue Oval

Red Oval

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Vintage Watching - Two Very Rare 1970 Helmet Jump Hour Watches

Holy crap, I've seen one of these before but fellow eccentric vintage jump hour collector Ruud has found two of them at once! You'll hear more and more about his amazing collection of vintage digital jump hours in time to come... Now if I could only convince him to share the wealth, hell, I'm probably the only other person in the world who would actually want this ridiculous rarity.

A vertical drum display not unlike the 1974 Jaz Derby Swissonic (featured-->here) Or my favorite of all time, the 1950s Patek Philippe Cobra (featured-->here)

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Vintage Watching - A Bumper Crop of New Old Watches

Just compiled a collection of oddities and obscurities from the forties through the seventies! So fresh to the site that not all the descriptions have even been written!

Visit the new collection here-->LINK

All kinds of rare oddball stuff!

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

From Russia With Lust - History of Communist and Cosmonaut Wristwatches

Click photo for close-up

Every now and then, I find someone who rivals my perversions for collecting timepieces. This is doubly true about a man named Ill-Phil, a self-diagnosed terminal watch pervert. His is a rare disorder of Russianitis, a condition that propels him to collect and document in great detail, everything you need to know about Russian watches.

Kidding aside, Phil's Russian Times is overwhelmingly thorough with photos of every imaginable Russian watch as well as the technical information about every factory, brand, movement, marking, and cyrillic translation.

And one of my favorite parts of the site, the lovingly assembled and obsessively researched portraits of cosmonauts and their watches.

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