Collection Find: Longines 1952 19AS “Cam-Drive” Automatic
A New Addition to my Private Collection:
This US-market Longines sits right on an interesting fault line in automatic watch movement history. On the wrist it reads like a classic early-1950s dress watch—gold-fill, sharp lugs, and an interesting 2-tone dial with roman numeral indices. However, the real reason I’m attached to it is the movement. The Longines 19AS is one of those interesting, transitional full-rotor automatics that still feels distinctly like it was “engineered,” with a unique winding system that doesn’t simply follow the later, cookie-cutter ETA-style playbook. It’s from a period when Longines was at the top of its engineering game and actively iterating on how best to translate rotor motion into consistent winding—right as the industry was leaving bumpers behind and converging on modern layouts. The resulting design, while not as efficient as later systems, was clearly built to be a lifelong companion, not a disposable fashion piece.
I have published a detailed breakdown of the really interesting automatic design in this watch in my blog.