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Gruen means Curvex cases and thin gold dress watches sold out of Cincinnati, at least in the collector shorthand. It does not mean a depth rating. Yet six hundred feet sits on the dial of this Gruen Autowind, under an oversized cushion case and a rotating timing bezel, and the route it took to get there runs through two countries and one very deliberate piece of architecture.
That architecture came first. Gruen moved into a new Cincinnati headquarters in 1917, at a site the company named Time Hill, and had Guy C. Burroughs model it loosely on a medieval guild hall. The conceit went well past the masonry. Gruen traded under the name The Gruen Watchmakers Guild, and Frederick Gruen described the aim in the 1920s as making “useful things in a beautiful way, under ideal surroundings.” An American company had dressed itself in European craft tradition, in brick, and for forty years it sold.
The other half of the company was genuinely European. Gruen had been drawing movements out of Biel since the 1870s, and around 1922 it built a new factory of its own there. The building was called the Precision Factory, and that is the entire reason the word turns up on a dial: the best movements Gruen sold came out of it, and those were the watches marked Precision. The Cincinnati half did not hold. Time Hill was sold in 1958, what remained moved to a New York office, and from that point the watches were made in Switzerland outright. The factory records did not survive the move, which is why these late pieces are dated by what is stamped on them rather than by a ledger.
The Gruen Autowind 600 Feet is one of those late Swiss watches, and it is the standing argument against filing the brand under dress watches. The case is a cushion measuring 41mm across and 43.5 lug to lug on 20mm lugs, oversized for its moment, carrying a bi-directional bezel whose silver-grey bakelite insert is marked in ten-minute steps with a luminous triangle at zero. The black dial reads Precision above Autowind above the depth rating, so a name that started as a building ends up on the front of a diver, and the origin line at the foot still carries its tritium T’s. Under a domed acrylic crystal, applied rectangular markers hold lume aged to an even cream, matched in the broad hands, with the date at three and the Gruen automatic caliber 731CA, seventeen jewels, running underneath.
Wear is present and we leave it that way: fine hairlines and scuffs across the brushed case and bezel edge, light haze and surface marks in the crystal, a seconds hand darkened with age. The printing is unbroken and the lume has aged as one. Inside the caseback it is stamped GRUEN WATCH Co. / SWITZERLAND, which is the late history of this company in one stamping.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, holding inside fifteen seconds a day, on an anthracite Italian suede strap with our own buckle. The Precision Factory in Biel was sold in 1977 to Aegler, the firm that built Rolex’s movements. The word stayed on the dial.
