6,210 HKD
Harwood, 1930's. Fine and rare, tonneau-shaped, self-winding, silver gentleman's wristwatch with power reserve indication. three body, massive, polished, reeded revolving bezel for hand-setting. matte silver with radiumcoated Arabic numerals, aperture for the up-and-down indication. "Skeleton" radium-coated hands. Notes The Harwood Self-Winding Wristwatch The earliest self-winding wristwatches known are two examples made by L. Leroy & Cie. One, made in 1922, is in a private collection, and the other, completed on January 21, 1929, was sold by Antiquorum, Geneva, L'Art de l'Horlogerie en France, November 14, 1993, lot 152. Both these watches are illustrated in La montre automatique ancienne, by A. CHAPUIs and E. JAQuET, Editions du Griffon, Neuchatel, 1952, p. 226. These watches, however, can be considered as prototypes as they were never made in series. The first attempt to produce a self-winding wristwatch in series was made in England by John Harwood and Harry Cutts, just after World War I. John Harwood (1893-1965), became interested in automatic winding while he was still an apprentice to a watchmaker. In the Isle of Man where he lived, Harwood experimented building prototypes one after the other, until he arrived at a solution which involved a 10 1 / 2 "' movement fitted in a 13"' case. He devised an originally type of hand-setting work operated by turning the bezel which, combined with a selfwinding system, made it possible to eliminate the stem traversin Read more…
Auctioneer:
Antiquorum
Date:
1999-06-07
