Don't miss the next drop
Omega keeps something few watchmakers can: production and delivery ledgers, held in Bienne for more than a century and complete enough that the factory can take a single movement’s serial and say what the watch is and the date it left. This Omega Jumbo comes with that record. Its Extract from the Archives is Omega’s own account of the reference 2256/1, drawn from the books rather than pieced together from a serial chart and a hopeful guess.
That paperwork matters more on a watch like this than on the small dress Omegas of the same years. Through the 1940s the dress watch sat around 33 to 35mm, and the oversized references, the ones collectors now call Jumbos, were the deliberate exception. At 37.5mm the 2256/1 was built large when large was rare. Oversized 1940s Omegas are also exactly the pieces whose stories tend to get muddied over the decades, and this one’s is settled at the source.
The number that ties the watch to those books is stamped on the movement itself: the serial 11567542, which a dating chart places in the late 1940s and which the Extract is keyed to. Eight digits on a rose-gilt plate are a small thing, and on a watch that has passed through the better part of eighty years and at least one owner’s hands, they are the difference between a history that must be argued for and one that is on record.
What the record describes, the watch still is. The movement is the caliber 280, Omega’s postwar renumber of the wartime 30T2 SC and part of the 30mm family the marque built its mid-century reputation on. It carries the seconds from the center, by the indirect route Omega relied on before direct sweep seconds became routine, in the standard 17-jewel grade. No chronometer grade is claimed here, and the dial asks for none.
The Omega Jumbo’s case is Staybrite stainless steel, 37.5mm across and 46mm lug to lug, wearing larger still behind a narrow bezel and a tall domed crystal. The lugs are faceted and lightly swept, the flanks polished and holding the soft hairlines of a watch worn rather than shelved, and the outer caseback keeps a former owner’s initials, scratched into the steel by hand and left as part of the record rather than sanded away. The dial has aged into its best version, a silvered cream now warmed and carrying an even scatter of foxing, the fine tan speckle a refinished dial never has. Gilt Arabic numerals mark the even hours with applied gold dots between them, the leaf hands gilt to match, the central seconds blued, and no lume anywhere, exactly right for a dress Omega of this age.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our two-year mechanical warranty, we have paired it with a black Ostrich strap on an OTTUHR buckle. A vintage watch is usually bought on trust and a good story. This Omega Jumbo arrives with the story already on file in Bienne, and, to us, a dial that has spent the decades since earning the rest.
