Don't miss the next drop
Turn this Longines over and you meet its first owner: the caseback is engraved RETIRED MEMBER, LOCAL 731, 1963. In our opinion a vintage Longines like this one is worth more for that line than any box or paper could add, because it fixes the watch to a person and a year. Someone put in the decades, a union local marked the occasion, and this dress piece went home on a wrist that had earned it.
Longines has been signing dials from Saint-Imier since 1832, and the winged hourglass above the name is the oldest registered trademark still in active use, filed in 1889 and unchanged since. By the early 1960s the brand was at the height of its reputation for thin, precise, beautifully finished dress watches, and the Ref. 1116 sits squarely in that tradition.
Inside runs the manual wind Longines caliber 370, visible here with its bridges signed LONGINES WATCH CO. and SWITZERLAND and marked UNADJUSTED, the standard notation on movements built for the American market of the period. It is a clean, flat, well laid out caliber of the kind Longines made in-house when in-house still meant something, the sort of mid-century manual movement that built the brand’s reputation for keeping honest time.
The case is 10k yellow gold filled, not plated and not solid, which on a watch like this is exactly right: a thick bonded layer of gold over a base metal, the construction that let mid-century Americans own a gold-toned Swiss dress watch without a solid-gold price. The inner caseback is stamped with the reference 1116 and 10K GOLD FILLED. It measures 33mm across and 37.4mm lug to lug, with 18mm lugs, and the faceted, gently flared lugs give it more presence on the wrist than the numbers suggest. There is honest wear to the gold at the lug tips and along the bezel edge, the soft warmth a gold filled case takes on after sixty years, and we have left it as it came to us.
The frosted linen dial is the reason to own this one. Its fine cross-hatch texture catches light in a way a flat dial never will, shifting from near-white to warm silver as the wrist moves, and the applied gold markers, faceted batons notched at the top, sit just proud of the surface to throw their own small shadows. Gold dauphine hands track the hours above a sub-seconds register at six, and the dial is signed LONGINES beneath the winged emblem with SWISS at the base. Sixty-plus years have brought a little gentle spotting toward the edges, and on a textured dial it reads as depth rather than flaw.
We have fitted it to a blue grained leather strap with a warm cognac lining and contrast stitching, closed with our OTTUHR signed buckle. The blue is an easy, slightly unexpected pairing with a warm gold case, dressy without being severe.
It has been serviced in-house at OTTUHR and is backed by our two-year mechanical warranty, so it is ready to wear daily rather than admire in a drawer. For the collector who would rather own a watch with a story already written into it than a perfect one with none, this is a quiet, characterful, genuinely personal vintage Longines. Some watches you buy. This one was given, and it kept the date.
