Don't miss the next drop
Benrus began in 1921 as a New York repair shop run by three brothers newly arrived from Romania, and the name is just the founder’s own contracted: Benjamin Lazrus became Benrus. Oscar ran the advertising, Benjamin the production, Ralph the selling. What the brothers never did was build a movement. They bought Swiss ebauches, had them signed with the company’s name, and sold the results as American watches, which is the thing worth knowing before turning over a Benrus Sky Chief.
The Sky Chief arrived in 1940 as a working pilot’s chronograph, and Benrus sold it hard. Presentation boxes surviving from the period carry the slogan across the lid: Official Watch of Famous Airlines. The company did become a supplier to commercial carriers, and examples still surface with airline property engravings on the caseback, though we have not found a period document naming them. The brief itself is not in doubt. Timing a fuel burn, a leg between beacons, a hold before landing: that was arithmetic worked against a running stopwatch, and the watch was judged on whether the numbers came out.
Sky Chiefs came in more than one build, and this is the large one. The standard version ran the Valjoux 72 in a case around 35mm, and Benrus stamped it VZ-3. The other took the Valjoux 71, a full ligne wider at 31.3mm against 29.5mm, which needed a bigger case to carry it and wore a coin-edged bezel with a red triangle at twelve. Benrus called that one GH-4 and stamped the code on the bridge, where the ebauche maker’s name would otherwise sit. The bridge here reads MODEL GH-4. Beside it on the plate sits AXZ, the US import code Benrus carried under the 1936 trade agreement with Switzerland. Trade name and customs paperwork, on the same movement.
That bezel is also why the dial looks like this. On the GH-4 the crystal is fixed to the bezel and turns with it, which is a fine arrangement for setting a reference mark in a cockpit and a poor one for keeping weather out, so Sky Chief dials are as a rule water-marked and blotchy. This one drew the better hand. It left the factory silvered, and eight decades have taken it to a bloom of caramel and tobacco spreading from just above center, thinning through amber and old gold to pale champagne at the minute track, freckled dark throughout but reading as one continuous gradient rather than a patchwork. To us that is the whole watch.
Under the crystal, three snailed registers keep their contrast: running seconds at nine, thirty elapsed minutes at three, twelve elapsed hours at six, with blued steel hands and a red central chronograph hand over the top. The case measures 37.5mm across and 44mm lug to lug in stainless steel, rectangular pushers flanking a milled crown, and a snap back worth opening. Inside it, watchmakers have been signing their work. The earliest scratched mark reads 4-8-44, which puts this Benrus Sky Chief on a bench while the war was still running, and a later hand added another below it. The movement beneath is a seventeen-jewel manual-wind chronograph, and its column wheel sits under the cap doing what it did in 1944.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, on a black ostrich strap with our own buckle. Benrus sold this watch on the promise it could be trusted with numbers that mattered. Somebody kept taking it back to be checked, which is the better endorsement.
