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Horological Meandering

A few remarks...

 

Hello, Frank,
stunning collection ! Thanks a lot for sharing !!!

Your love is more than obvious and personally I'm with you - it's a true beauty and certainly a true testimonial of this time.

I happen to like amost all chronographs of this pioneering period and tecnically the first 40 years of the 20th. century
are a real treat.

I'm not sure if it's just your enthusiasm for this watch - but IMVHO in certain parts your statements are historically incorrect and
certainly a bit exaggerating.
Just a few points:
As I pointed out earlier - Longines filed patents for the flyback mechanism in 1936 (IIRC) and undoubtedly created the first
chrono movement with this feature - many years before UROFA - perhaps it would be interesting to look a bit in history if there was some case of IP infringement....

Your point about the asymetrical pushers - first I thought you could be joking, do you have any sources for this hypothesis?
I know the reason for the pusher arrangement, but would be curious to know who invented this funny reasoning about 
"safety feature" because the reset pusher is about 10 degrees more off than, let's say a Valyoux movement....
Thats surely not the case as this hardly helps - it's already hard to confuse the Start/Stop pusher vs.  the Reset having a big  a crown between them -
that would require at least a drunken  pilot in the dark  -)
Just have a look at all available chrono movements of that times - the majority has this "feature" .

The case isn't "antimagnetic" as well - brass isn't magnetic - but hardly has any shielding properties!

As an anecdotal sidenote - I've personally spoken to an old watchmaker from Glashütte. Back in the time when they were working on those watches
they were joking about the "rubbish", cheap cases - "well, you know, those cases only need to serve as long as the plane crashs, it's not supposed to come back
very often..." That must have been true in those sad times.

BTW, how many of yours do have shock protection? Originally the german military orders/descriptions required shock protection ( I find this quite interesting, as the
british military for example was satisfied without this crusial feature, I never undesrtood why - that must have been a cost issue) - Glashütte obviously had big problems to get enough supplies for the Shock-Resist  parts - not sure if correct, but personal impression is Hanhart with Incabloc are found relatively more often.

Don't take offense please - I like this watches - especially cause they're german as I am as well smile
But IMO you're putting this watch a bit too high on the pedestal.
The swiss, btw helped quite a lot in making this watch - maybe a lot more than you could imagine - UROFA movements and watches
have a strong followership, but most don't realize that many of their achievements were in fact "old achievements" made by swiss companies.
What I don't know is - did UROFA simply copy as during that period nobody cared about other countries rights/patents, etc - or was this some sort of
hidden cooperation. Both very well possible - the swiss certainly wouldn't have had any interest in making their help public....

Best regards
Suitbert

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