Don't miss the next drop
The gold lettering on the movement of this Universal Genève automatic reads like a form somebody had to fill out. SWISS. UNIVERSAL. GENEVE. 139. 17. UNADJUSTED. SEVENTEEN JEWELS. Very little of that is decoration. Paragraph 367 of the Tariff Act of 1930 required every movement entering the United States to carry, cut into its plate or bridges, the country of manufacture, the name of the maker or purchaser, the jewel count in words and in numerals both, and, if it had not been adjusted, the word unadjusted. That is why the count is there twice. Universal Genève was not boasting. It was declaring, and a movement that got the wording wrong was refused entry.
Then there is the code. Small enough to miss, three letters sit on the bridge: HOX. That mark comes from a separate piece of trade law, the 1936 reciprocal agreement with Switzerland, under which the Swiss watchmaking chamber assigned every American importer its own three letter code and registered it with the Treasury. HOX belonged to the Henri Stern Watch Agency of New York, and Henri Stern was Patek Philippe’s man in America. He had taken on Universal Genève’s American distribution in 1941, partly to keep a supply line to Geneva open through the war, and the arrangement long outlasted it. That is how we come to be reading a Patek agency’s code on a Universal movement.
The case never made that Atlantic crossing. The inside of the caseback is signed STAR WATCH CASE COMPANY in an arc, with 10KT. GOLD FILLED and the serial 9961371 struck beneath it. Star worked out of Ludington, Michigan, and the outline star stamped on the outside next to 10K GOLDFILLED was its own trademark. So this Universal Genève automatic is a Swiss movement, brought into the country through the same New York office that handled Patek Philippe, living inside an American case.
What all that paperwork was wrapped around deserves its own mention. The caliber 139 is a bumper automatic, and the name is literal: the winding weight does not sweep in circles, it swings through a limited arc and knocks against a spring buffer at either end. Universal launched the family in 1948, right as the rest of the industry was moving on to full rotation rotors. That turned out not to be a mistake. When the first Polerouters appeared in November 1954, they arrived on the bumper caliber 138SS, the sibling of the movement in this watch. The reference works do not distinguish the two.
The watch itself is restrained. The white dial has picked up a fine even freckling, the sort of age that only shows at close range, and the applied gold batons hold luminous fill gone a dark greenish brown. UNIVERSAL GENÈVE sits below twelve, AUTOMATIC above six, SWISS at the outer edge, and there is no date to interrupt any of it. Gold dauphine hands and a slim sweep seconds hand run over the top. The 10k gold filled case measures 33.5mm across, with a smooth fixed bezel, faceted lugs, a tall domed crystal and a reeded crown, and the caseback carries the light scratching of a watch that was actually worn.
It has been serviced in-house and runs inside fifteen seconds a day, and it comes with our 2-year mechanical warranty on a powder blue Italian suede strap with an OTTUHR buckle. Seventy-odd years on, the declaration still reads, and to us that is the appeal: a watch that had to tell the truth about itself before it was let into the country.
