Don't miss the next drop
By the time Longines built an automatic, it was late to the idea on purpose. Rivals had been selling self-winding watches for years when the company finally started its research in 1944, and it set itself an awkward rule: the movement would be designed in-house, from a clean sheet, so Longines could learn from everyone else’s mistakes rather than inherit them. This vintage Longines automatic, reference 6536-1, is what that stubbornness eventually grew into.
Before it would put the movement on sale, Longines handed prototypes to its own employees across the factory to wear and test. Only then did the caliber 22A reach the public in 1946, the first automatic the Longines Manufacture ever built, wound by a patented bidirectional system meant to shrug off the wear that had troubled earlier self-winders. It sold for six years. In 1952 the company refined the whole idea into the more sophisticated 19A family, better finished and more cleverly wound, and this reference carries the center-seconds member of it.
That member is the caliber 19AS, a full rotor that swings the complete circle and winds both ways, its eccentric winder a close cousin of the system IWC made famous. What sits on the wrist, then, is not a milestone or a loud complication. It is a company being careful in public, the whole cautious decade of its automatic development distilled into one unhurried movement.
The case is where all that patience turns visible. Just 35mm of stainless steel, it swells outward from every angle in the bombe curve that dress watches wore through the 1950s, the lugs rolling down toward the wrist beneath a tall domed crystal that pushes the shape further still. The black dial has settled into a soft, even speckle over seven decades, ornate scrolled Arabic numerals holding twelve, three, six and nine while faceted arrow markers fill the hours between, the printing original throughout. The dauphine hands and the applied plots keep their period lume, gone a warm brown that reads as age rather than harm. Turn it over and the rotor is signed LONGINES AUTOMATIC, the case numbers matching inside and on the lug, the flanks softened by honest polishing and otherwise left just as we found it.
We service every watch in-house and back this one with our 2-year mechanical warranty, fitted here to an anthracite Italian suede strap on our signed OTTUHR buckle and sized to roughly an 8 inch wrist. Longines took the better part of a decade making sure its automatics were worth wearing. Seventy years on, this vintage Longines automatic is still making the point.
