Don't miss the next drop
In a confidential 1967 report to its own commission, the Neuchatel Observatory named the four firms it believed could actually win its wristwatch competition: Longines, Omega, Zenith, and Movado. That opinion stayed private. The watch on this page is a Movado Chronometre from exactly those years.
The published results bear it out. Movado took the top wrist chronometer at Neuchatel in 1956, again in 1957, and again in 1958, and in 1957 it swept the podium, first, second and third. Lower scores won, because a theoretically perfect watch would have scored zero, and the 1958 winner scored 4.6, best of 115 entries. The same man regulated all three annual winners: G. Sautebin, of La Chaux-de-Fonds. Neuchatel handed prizes to adjusters personally, separately from the factories that employed them, which is why one man’s name still sits beside a movement number seventy years on.
Those competition watches were built and tuned for the trial and were almost never sold to anybody. This is not one of them and we will not pretend otherwise. This is the Movado Chronometre the factory sold on the strength of them.
Movado’s 1959 advertising ran four Navy jets locked in close formation and argued that the flying was the crude part next to the watch. Underneath, the price list read: Kingmatic Chronometer, self winding, water resistant, 28 jewels, with a certificate from the Swiss bureau that controlled watch performance, $350 in 18K gold and $200 in steel and 14K gold. This one is the second of those. The ordinary Movado automatics, 17 jewels, started at $85 in the line below. No certificate came down with this watch and we have never seen one.
The case runs 34mm across on 18mm lugs, gold capped over a steel core, with the caseback left as bare stainless steel. The champagne dial has freckled evenly right across its face; the applied batons double at three and nine and triple at twelve, and the dauphine hands have gone a mottled brown. A small pale mark sits just left of the hand stack, and we have left it exactly as it came to us. The crown is fluted gold, the crystal a domed acrylic, and the lug faces are cut with a facet that picks up light as the wrist turns. No date, no subdial, no register to break up the face. Inside is Movado’s caliber 436, a full rotor automatic, and the bridge beneath it reads ADJUSTED TO TEMPERATURE AND FIVE (5) POSITIONS, which is the factory’s own claim and not anybody’s certificate.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, on a green saffiano strap with our own buckle. Neuchatel ran its wrist trial for 45 days across ten periods, and no standard since has asked that much of a watch. Movado won it three years running, in a room where a perfect score was zero. This is what it sold to the rest of us.
