Don't miss the next drop
Lift the caseback on this Tissot automatic bumper and you meet two signatures from two countries. The movement is Swiss, signed Chs Tissot & Fils. The case around it was made in America. That small contradiction is the whole reason this one rewards a second look: a Tissot that travels on two passports.
The reason is a quirk of 1950s customs law. United States duty treated a watch as two separate things, the movement and the case, and a case built on American soil owed no import duty at all. So the trade did the plain arithmetic: bring the Swiss movements across on their own, then fit them into domestic cases once they landed. A whole American industry grew up around that gap, assembling Swiss hearts into stateside shells and selling them as finished watches.
The firm that cased this one was the Star Watch Case Company of Ludington, Michigan, casemakers since 1899 for Hamilton, Gruen, and in later years even Omega, and among the last of the American case houses still running when it closed in 1982. Star signed its work with a small star, the mark struck here into the bezel just ahead of the gold-filled stamp.
That transatlantic bargain is exactly what this watch is. Its movement is a bumper automatic, caliber 28.5-21, the kind whose weight taps a sprung buffer at each end and sends a soft knock through the caseback. It descends from Tissot’s first automatic, the caliber 28.1 of 1944, which places it in the brand’s first generation of self-winders. Lift the stainless back and both passports are there at once: a cursive Tissot above STAR WATCH CASE COMPANY, the two makers who built the watch between them.
The rest earns the story. The case is 33.5mm, 42mm across the lugs on 18mm spacing, a true mid-century footprint that wears close, its 10K gold-filled bezel over a stainless back softened at the high points the way a lifetime of wear leaves a case, and we have left it exactly that way. The dial is glossy black under gilt printing, a slim gilt crosshair ruled twelve to six and nine to three, quartering the face, with applied gold Arabic numerals and slender gold dauphine hands over a central sweep seconds. There is no lume, and there never was, which dates it before the tritium era. Look closely and the black now carries a fine even speckle, the honest texture of a surface left original rather than refinished.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our two-year mechanical warranty, this Tissot automatic bumper comes fitted to a mud grey leather strap on an OTTUHR buckle, a matte grey that cools the warmth of the gold. A Swiss movement, an American case, one wrist to hold both: that was the quiet arithmetic of the 1950s, and it still adds up.
