Horological Meandering

G99
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Milan, a subject that used to be very close to my heart

until 2 years ago i owned over 40 tuning forks from 1960 Accutron to Omega Speedsonic and Certina Chronolympic. all brands using the ESA calibre from Baume et Mercier through to Zenith. Tuning forks are fabulous watches and accurate beyond belief when on the wrist. they also have a lot of history you havent mentioned, i'll do that in a second.

if you notice the design of the dial in your advert. that design was only used twice. the first time was in the first production run in solid 14kt gold Alphas as in your ad and then in 1969 which was the last 214 run i believe. well take a look at the dial of my still owned 1960 Alpha.. 

yep, its the first production run Alpha which is why i kept it. the only other one i have is my 1962 original spaceview. not a conversion as many are. there is a great website from Australia that lists all the original spaceview case numbers. if it aint on the list it aint original. any one day on fleabay you can find more spaceviews for sale than were ever made

i have a lot of other pics of 'what i used to own', but they arent very good and i'm not a big believer in putting pics on the forum of watches i no longer own unless requested in the thread. most of them are the sellers pics taken before i owned a digital camera so are pretty poor.

anyway, a bit of important Accutron history especially in this special year of the moon landings.

the Accutron proved to be such a good timekeeper that a mains powered model was installed in the command module of the Apollo Spacecraft, a fact not widely known and not advertised correctly in my opinion. Last night i watched a programme on TV about the moon landings and at least one of the NASA ground technicians were wearing Accutrons. in this case a 218 Astronaut, very fitting.

another little known fact was that it was also installed in the Concorde control panel due to its extreme accuracy. bearing in mind both these craft were developed before quartz technology the Accutron was the best they could get. i sold one of my cars a few years ago to someone who had worked on the development of Concorde and he still wore an Accutron. he claimed he still hadnt found anything to compete with it.

in short, i love them, but even though i know a superb UK based Bulova trained repairer, they still cost quite a bit to fix when the simplest thing goes wrong. if you multiply that by 40 it adds up to amounts i wasnt prepared to pay.

i firmly believed, when i started collecting them, that within 10 years they would become true classics and the prices would fly out of the window. 15 years have passed and this has failed to come to fruition. very sad as they are superb watches even if a bit on the fragile side.

thanks for bringing the subject up. i could talk about them all day. one of my regrets is selling the 1964 2 tone assymetric i owned as i now collect watches from 1964, dooh!!

Best

Graham