Don't miss the next drop
On Thursday, October 21, 1937, a radio program went out across two continents so that an American watch company could hand two wristwatches to a Scottish earl and his countess. Elgin National Watch Company had a new premium line to introduce, and its factory town in Illinois happened to share a name with a Scottish earldom. So the first Lord Elgin and the first Lady Elgin were presented in London, in silver boxes struck with the Elgin crest, to the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine and the countess, handed over by Francis Powell of the American Chamber of Commerce as a gift from the city of Elgin, Illinois.
Then came the part worth repeating. Both watches were set, on air, to a signal sent from Elgin’s own observatory, which the company had built in 1910 so that it could take the time directly from the stars rather than borrow it from anybody else. The trade press of the day called it the time from the stars and put the tone beat at hundredths of a second. Fifty American stations carried the broadcast. Lord Elgin models went on sale at fifty dollars and up, real money for a wristwatch in 1937, and the company selling them would put its name, across its lifetime, on roughly half of every pocket watch made in the United States, dollar watches not counted.
What keeps all of that from being pure theatre is that the name arrived with a specification attached. A Lord Elgin meant a 21-jewel minimum, and Elgin held that floor from the 1930s until the company closed, while the Elgin De Luxe line beneath it ran 17. Which brings us to the movement in this one, stamped ELGIN 680 U-S-A, with ADJ’D and 21 JEWELS above it. The standard caliber reference files the grade 680, which arrived in 1951, under the model designation LE, for Lord Elgin, and its 682 and 683 siblings are the same 8/0 architecture built to 17 jewels instead. The printing on this dial has faded to a gold ghost, so the dial no longer says what it is. The movement still does.
Elgin called the black-dial version the Black Knight, gave its gold-dial twin the name Eldorado, and assigned the model the number 4814, stamped inside this caseback above the ring reading CASED AND TIMED BY ELGIN NATIONAL WATCH CO. The dial is worked in a fine honeycomb whose dimples stand out of the surface rather than press into it, with applied gold numerals at 12, 3 and 9, gold dagger markers between them, dauphine hands, and a plain sunken seconds register at six. The 14k gold filled case measures 40mm from lug tip to lug tip, most of that span carried by long sculpted lug shrouds that let a compact case wear like a considerably larger watch. It has been worn, honestly and for a long time: fine hairlines cover the bezel, the lug shrouds, the case flanks and the domed caseback, the crystal carries light haze at its edge and one fine scratch, the small seconds hand has picked up dark speckle, and a little green oxidation sits on the inside rim of the case and the inner rim of the caseback, which is what a gold filled shell of this age does. The gold has not worn through anywhere we can find it.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR, running inside fifteen seconds a day and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, it comes on a fresh black alligator grain leather strap. An Illinois company borrowed a Scottish title in 1937, then spent 21 jewels earning the right to keep using it.
