Don't miss the next drop
Watch a silver sunburst dial like this one shift in raking window light for a minute and you stop thinking about the badge. The radiating sunray pattern catches differently from every angle, walking the dial through a slow gradient of cool greys, hints of warm cream where the gold-tone markers throw their reflection, and back to bright polished steel where the light hits the center. In our opinion, this is precisely the Zodiac Hermetic dial that gets undersold in product photography and quietly closes the deal the moment a collector slides it onto the wrist.
Zodiac traces its origins to a small Le Locle workshop opened by Ariste Calame in 1882, with the Zodiac name registered in 1908 and the brand fully formalized in the decades that followed. By the mid-twentieth century, when this Zodiac Hermetic was made, the company was operating out of its modernist 1951 factory above the Le Locle train station and competing directly with Omega and Longines on build quality. The Hermetic line itself is the dress-watch sibling of the better-known SeaWolf, named for the hermetically sealed case construction Zodiac applied to its everyday timepieces to give them genuine water resistance at a time when most dress watches treated it as an afterthought. The Hermetic gets less attention in the secondary market than the SeaWolf does, which is exactly why we like sourcing them.
Inside this case sits the Zodiac caliber 70-72, the 17-jewel automatic Zodiac introduced in the early 1960s and ran across its mainstream automatic range for the better part of a decade. The movement beats at 21,600 vibrations per hour, carries roughly forty hours of power reserve, is hackset for accurate setting against a reference time signal, and features a quickset date that advances when the crown is pushed in and rotated. Looking at the back of this example through the open inner caseback, the rotor is signed AUTOMATIC across the top, then Zodiac LTD with the Zodiac globe-cross logo below the brand, 17 JEWELS in clean factory text, and SWISS at the bottom. The bridges and gear train have aged to a warm honest tone with the red balance jewel visible cleanly and no signs of moisture or amateur intervention. The 70-72 was the engine Doxa, Eberhard, and Favre-Leuba also drew on through this period, which gives it a kind of cross-marque pedigree that does not always get talked about.
The case is a 34mm round housing measuring 41mm lug to lug with 18mm lug width, finished in 10-micron gold plating over a stainless steel back, which is the construction Zodiac stamped explicitly on the inner caseback. That inner cover reads, in order, Zodiac WLtd, then G10. P. SWISS to confirm the ten-micron gold plating, then FOND ACIER INOXYDABLE for the stainless steel back, and the reference 723 917 stamped clearly across the center, with a secondary L 437 9 stamping along the lower edge. The outer caseback carries the full Zodiac decorative engraving, with AUTOMATIC and ANTIMAGNETIC arcing across the top flanking a small balance-scale device, WATER and SHOCK RESISTANT arcing around the edges, SWISS along the lower curve, and the Zodiac globe-cross logo paired with the Zodiac wordmark anchoring the bottom. The lugs are the wonderfully sculpted faceted style Zodiac favored on this generation, with polished sides meeting a sharp chamfered edge that catches light cleanly. The gold plating shows light surface wear consistent with honest use, the brushed central area of the outer back has softened with age, and the watch sits exactly where you want a sixty-year-old Le Locle automatic to sit.
The dial is the quiet headline. The silver sunburst radiates from a perfectly aligned center, with applied gold-tone baton hour markers carrying a dark inset stripe down each baton that gives the markers a clean three-dimensional read against the radiating sunray. The Zodiac globe-cross logo sits directly under the twelve position, with Zodiac in upright sans and Hermetic in flowing italic script immediately below, then Automatic in matching italic script floating below the dial center. At three, the date window is framed by a slim dark rectangle, with a white date wheel carrying crisp black numerals. T SWISS MADE T at six confirms the tritium-era specification. The hour and minute hands are darkened alpha-style with a slim sweep seconds hand reaching the outer minute track. There is nothing on this dial that fights itself, and that restraint is exactly what makes it read so handsomely on the wrist.
The crown deserves its own mention. Single position at three, gold-tone, vertically fluted edge, and signed with the Zodiac globe-cross logo engraved cleanly on the face, which is a small detail that consistently gets lost on Zodiacs of this era but is fully intact here.
We have paired the watch on a green full-grain leather strap with cream contrast stitching at the lugs, sized to fit comfortably up to an 8.5 inch wrist. The cool green picks up the silver in the dial and pulls the watch into a slightly more characterful register than a black or brown strap would, while still respecting the dress-watch lineage of the Hermetic line.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty. For the collector who values quiet engineering and an undervalued Le Locle name over noise, this Zodiac Hermetic is, to us, exactly the kind of properly preserved 1960s automatic we love sending out the door.
