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The small seconds on this Longines run inside a square. At six o’clock the dial steps down into a recessed register with square corners, quartered by a crosshair and swept by a fine gold-tone hand, so the outline of the case turns up again in miniature at the bottom of the dial. No numerals are printed inside it; the crosshair and the hand are the whole display. Of everything on this Longines Art Deco square, that sunken little square is the part we would show a friend first.
The rest of the dial keeps to the same geometry. Roman numerals appear at only three positions, XII, III and IX, with the LONGINES signature set just below the XII and applied round markers standing in for the other hours. The railway minute track runs along the four straight edges instead of around a circle, and two pointed, leaf-shaped hands in gold tone travel over it. The rose dial has aged unevenly, with mottling and scattered spots that gather toward the lower right.
The name under that XII carried a big boast in these years. Longines advertised itself through the 1940s and 1950s as The World’s Most Honored Watch, and the ads backed it with a tally: ten world’s fair grand prizes, 28 gold medals and a long string of accuracy awards from observatory trials. The line stayed in the company’s advertising for decades.
Four lugs give the case its personality. They flare out from the corners and are cut into facets, and seen from the side they arch away from a flat case flank while a curved crystal rises above the dial. Flared lugs like these were a hallmark of Retro design, a style that ran from the 1940s into the early 1950s. The measurements explain how it wears: 26.5mm across but 37.4mm from lug tip to lug tip, so the watch sits longer on the wrist than its width would suggest. Light marks show on the 10k gold-filled surfaces, and the back has scratches across its face.
Inside the back, the case is signed in script by Wadsworth, a Kentucky maker of gold-filled cases, and stamped with the Longines-Wittnauer name. Under it sits a round movement in a square case: the Longines 10L, a 17-jewel manual-wind caliber a little under 24mm across. Longines made its own movements in this period instead of buying them from outside suppliers, and the 10L is one of its compact hand-wound designs. Winding happens at the crown; there is no self-winding rotor. The movement serial, 7286943, places it in the late 1940s, the same years the flared lugs outside were in fashion.
