Don't miss the next drop
This Glycine Compressor, reference 645, is the quiet side of a brand most collectors know first for the Airman, the 24-hour pilot’s watch that carried Glycine across the Pacific in the 1950s. Where the Airman shouts utility, the Compressor folds genuine water-resistant engineering under a clean silver sunburst dial and asks only to be worn, and in our opinion it is the more wearable of the two. The 645 is one of the more honest dress-tool watches of the 1960s.
Glycine has worked out of Bienne since Eugene Meylan founded the house in 1914, and from the start it leaned toward small, well-finished automatics rather than show pieces. By the time this 645 left the workshop the firm had spent decades building its name on quietly competent self-winding watches, and the Compressor line is where that competence met a genuinely clever case.
The interesting part of any Compressor is the back. The name belongs to Ervin Piquerez S.A., the Bassecourt case maker known as EPSA, which patented a self-compressing caseback in the mid-1950s. The idea reads as counterintuitive until it settles: instead of a gasket that simply resists water, EPSA built a spring-loaded back whose seal tightens as outside pressure climbs, so the deeper the watch goes, the harder it holds. Single-crown cases like this one wear the Compressor name, while the twin-crown versions with an internal rotating bezel became the Super Compressor that divers chase today. EPSA marked its work with a small diving-helmet stamp inside the caseback, the detail collectors look for, and the AUTOMATIC COMPRESSOR designation printed on this dial places the 645 squarely in that family.
The steel case measures 34mm across and 42mm from lug to lug, with 18mm lugs and a single knurled crown set into the right flank. The outer caseback is stamped 645 over 899389, the reference above the serial, and it carries its years honestly, with light hairlines and soft brushing across the back that we have left exactly as found. It is a compact watch by modern habit, though the lugs reach just far enough to sit properly on the wrist.
The dial is the reason to own it. A silver sunburst plays the light from the center outward, with the GLYCINE name and its little crown emblem under twelve and AUTOMATIC COMPRESSOR set in two quiet lines above six. The applied faceted batons each carry a small luminous pip, and those, along with the lume set into the dauphine hands, have aged to a warm tan with a touch of spotting that we read as character rather than fault. SWISS MADE sits at the foot of the dial. Nothing here has been touched or reprinted, and the patina is the watch’s own record of sixty-odd years.
It comes on a black leather strap with cream contrast stitching, closing on a buckle, an understated pairing that lets the dial carry the watch without crowding a case this size.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, this Glycine Compressor is the sort of watch that rewards the collector who reads casebacks. Compact, characterful, and quietly over-engineered, it offers real water-resistant pedigree in a dress-watch footprint. For the collector who would rather wear the clever idea than the loud one, the 645 is exactly that. To us, the best watches keep their engineering where only the wearer ever finds it.
