Don't miss the next drop
In April 1954, Longines carried a name into the Federal Intellectual Property Office in Berne and asked to have it protected. Conquest was the first watch line the company had ever defended that way, filed on the third of the month and registered that May. Longines had been building watches since 1832 and had protected the winged hourglass on its dials at that same office since 1889, but a model name had never seemed worth the paperwork. Every named Longines collection since has followed that precedent, and this Longines Conquest Calendar belongs to the first generation of the line that established it.
A protected name is a promise, and Longines made this one physical. Into the back of the early Conquest went a hand-enamelled medallion, recessed into the caseback where the owner would see it each time the watch came off the wrist. Workaday case marks stayed hidden inside where only a watchmaker reads them; the medallion faced out. Longines then coded it to the metal, a fish in green enamel for the steel references and an ocean and night sky in blue for the gold. The fish stood for water resistance, the quality the whole line was built to sell.
This one is steel, and it wears the fish. Inside the caseback it is stamped ACIER INOX, so the emblem on the outside and the metal it sits in still agree seventy years on. Under the rotor sits calibre 19ASD, the member of Longines’ 19-series that added a date alongside sweep seconds, nineteen jewels and a full central rotor. Serial 10074139 places production in 1956, and the date sits at three, where the 9004 wore it.
It measures 35mm across and 42.75 lug to lug on 18mm lugs, with a tall domed crystal adding the height. The dial has settled into two tones, an eggshell center against a brushed silver chapter ring, all twelve applied faceted markers present and their lume aged to one uniform tan. Printing is crisp and unbroken. The hands are the honest part: hour and minute have both corroded dark with heavy finish loss, and against a pale dial there is nowhere for that to hide. Foxing specks scatter across the dial, and the case carries the softened lug tips and fine hairlines of past polishing. The dish around the medallion is well scratched, the gilt has worn thin along one arc of the ring, and the green enamel has dulled slightly at the fish’s lower edge, which we leave as it is. Brown corrosion and light pitting run inside the case rim, with a matching spot inside the caseback, left by a moisture episode somewhere in this watch’s past. It is the same story the hands are telling. That medallion promised water resistance in 1954. We read the promise as a period marking and keep this one dry.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, holding inside ten seconds a day, on an olive ostrich strap with our own buckle. Longines spent 122 years not protecting a model name. It has not stopped since.
