At a certain point in your horological journey, you begin to realize that you don’t have to spend a fortune to own a really interesting piece of watchmaking. Complicated pocketwatches sell for a fraction of the equivalent wristwatch and allow you to own, say, a perpetual calendar Patek for the price of a time-only wristwatch. Perhaps ever greater value can be found in stopwatches.
Sure, they don’t actually tell the time – all they do is time things, but occasionally, you can find some really interesting stopwatches for very cheap. Heuer made some great ones, and a lot of them – they are always for sale on eBay (stay tuned to our Features section for more on that). But, a stopwatch I came across while digging through the dingy booths of 47th street just yesterday has really struck me.
The video above shows a stopwatch made by Junghans of Germany in, what i would guess, was the late 60s or early 1970s. Junghans is probably best known for its Max Bill wristwatch – but I tend to prefer the original Bill kitchen clocks, on which the wristwatch is actually based.
But, Junghans wasn’t only Max Bill, as demonstrated by the stopwatch shown above. It is surely in the Bill vein with a stark, minimalist white dial, but what what makes this barnyard find stopwatch so interesting is that it is actually a 1/10th of a second stopwatch. When activated, the dial at 6 o’clock begins to move very quickly, and that is tracking .1 seconds. At upper right, you will see the seconds moving, and upper left, the minutes. When you stop and reset the stopwatch, the 1/10th of a second gauge resets in a very cool way.
What is amazing about this watch is that today, with the world seemingly obsessed with high-speed chornograph (e.g., TAG’s Mikrograph, Mikrotimer, and Mikrogirder, FP Journe’s Centigraphe, and Zenith’s Stirking Tenth), is that Junghans was able to make a watch that could track to a 1/10th of a second way back then, and for what I would guess is not very much much money. In fact, the money i paid for this watch in perfect working order yesterday could barely buy a decent dinner in NYC. It makes me wonder if Junghans, or another brand even, could take the concept of this 17-jewel stopwatch and update it into a wristwatch? Imagine a 1/10th of a second chronograph for even less than the $ 12,000 Zenith Striking Tenth.
Either way, go ahead and take a look around at what you can find in vintage Stopwatches and vintage Junghans, you might just find something you’ll love for not much money – just like I did.
Did You Know? Max Bill also designed a watch for Omega!
From:HODINKEE
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