I wanted a very prototypical American pocket watch for my collection, and found this Waltham. It’s nothing fancy - 15 jewels, not railroad grade, but it works well and serves me as a reminder of a time when the best watches in the world were made in the USA. The porcelain dial unfortuntely has several hairline cracks (not unusual for porcelain), but otherwise it’s a very clean example.

Pocket watches with a chronograph complication are pretty rare, so I was thrilled when I was able to pick up this single-pusher Le Phare example, which was in non-running condition and very dirty but which cleaned up beautifully and still works well. I didn’t do much with the case, because the real beauty here is on the inside. Chronograph lovers with a keen eye may notice the lack of an intermediate minute recording wheel, as well as the odd shark tooth design of the minute recording wheel itself. That’s because this watch has an instantaneous minute recording mechanism that builds spring tension until it snaps the minute recorder over at the appropriate moment. It’s pretty cool and amazingly still works very well. I can only speculate that this mechanism design didn’t show up in later wristwatch chronographs because it was difficult to miniaturize.

AN 5740 military pocket watches were issued to aircraft (primarily bomber) navigators in all service branches during WWII and into the early post war period. Watches meeting the specification were manufactured by Elgin, Waltham, and Hamilton. Unusually for a pocket watch, they have a central second hand and a hacking mechanism, as well as a 24 hour dial. They were typically mounted in special cases, meant to protect the watch from the effects of vibration, temperature and altitude, and were generally set to Greewich Mean Time (hence the G.C.T. on the dial). This Hamilton example, despite its age, still tells time very accurately.

I honed in on this Gruen pocket watch from the 1920s for its lovely gold relief dial. It’s interesting to contrast the relatively simple finishing of the Swiss made movement in this watch with the relatively elaborate finishing on contemporary American-made pocket watch movements. The keyless works design on this watch is also very much in line with the Swiss designs that would come to dominate the wristwatch industry, in contrast to keyless works designs on American pocket watches, which were designed quite differently.