Watches

Here’s another incredibly beautiful watch to be auctioned at this year’s Only Watch charity event in Monaco, in September. The watch is produced by Vulcain, a company I hadn’t heard of before, mainly because of their limited distribution in North America but they are quite famous in Europe. Vulcain does have quite a bit of history to their watches; they are most famous for two things: 1 – Vulcain was the first watch manufacturer to produce a wristwatch with a true alarm system called “cricket”, in 1947 and 2 – Vulcain calls itself “President’s watch” because U.S. president Harry S Truman and all other presidents after him owned Vulcain watches, among other prominent world figures.

The Vulcain Anniversary Heart features the famous “cricket” alarm system, I looked up this feature on youtube and it does sound like a cricket chirping. The watch face is skeletonized; revealing the intricate mechanics that make this beautiful timepiece tick, the barrel bridge and movement bridge have been hand-decorated by master engravers. The watch face is finished in white with blue hands and Roman numerals.

Later this year the 23^rd film in the James Bond franchise will be released, called Skyfall, 2012 also marks the 50^th anniversary of James Bond movies.  To celebrate this milestone, Omega has released a special edition of the James Bond watch, also known as the Omega Seamaster.  The British spy has been wearing Omega watches in all the movies since Golden Eye in 1995.

The limited edition Omega Seamaster James Bond 50^th Anniversary watch comes in 41 mm and 36.25 mm cases.  The 41 mm version will be limited to 11,007 pieces while the 36 mm version will be limited to 3,007 pieces and comes with a diamond at the 7 o’clock index position.

The 1960’s were the heydays of space travel and right there amongst the astronauts was Breitling, the Swiss watch manufacturer.  On May 24^th, 1962 Lieutenant Commander Scott Carpenter orbited the earth three times in the Aurora 7 capsule and on his wrist was a Breitling Navitimer watch.  The Breitling Navitimer was first introduced in 1952 and was a favorite among pilots; it met all the requirements for a watch that would work perfectly in space, so Breitling commissioned a Cosmonaute version for the space program with a 24 hour counter which was necessary to tell whether it was day or night in space.

After successfully introducing the Space Invader watches, Romain Jerome is going to be producing another set of watches with a classic video game theme.  This time the watches feature the iconic PAC-MAN game design on their dials and like the Space Invader watches; you can’t actually play the games.

Romain Jerome teamed up with NAMCO BANDAI to create these retro-tastic limited edition timepieces, only 80 will be produced with 4 versions of the design (20 pieces in each design).  I’ve seen the PAC-MAN design used on some clocks and many low-end watches but this is the first time

Swiss watchmaker, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and Aston Martin have been collaborating on automobile themed watches for 8 years and their latest creation is the AMVOX7 chronograph, the 7^th watch in the line.

The watch is a pretty good looking piece but to say the dial is “busy” would be an understatement.  It took me over 10 minutes to find the date window (located at 6 o’clock position), I thought the sub-dial at the 3 o’clock position was for the date and the sub-dial at the 9 o’clock was for months, boy was I wrong.