Company profile: Mido was founded in Solothurn, Switzerland on 11 November 1918 by Georges Schaeren, and it is now based in Le Locle. The name comes from the Spanish, “Yo mido,” I measure, and the brand has always had strong links with South America. In the 1920s the brand became famous for its watches with…
The Omega De Ville Prestige Butterfly was presented in October 2014 in Seoul, at Dongdaemun Design Plaza designed by Zaha Hadid, in a spectacular installation where the Plaza was filled with 21,000 white flowers lit by LED bulbs. This year, the watch will be released in a new version, the Omega De Ville Prestige Dewdrop,…
There are four new watches in the Omega Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon collection originally launched in 2013. They are named Vintage Black, Sedna Black, Pitch Black and Black Black. Vintage Black is distinctive for the vintage beige SuperLuminova and the brown leather strap. In Sedna Black, the darkness is relieved by Sedna gold…
There’s no doubt about it, George Clooney was perfect in Gravity, and he looked very much the part at Omega’s celebration of its links to space travel on 12 May in an aircraft hangar in Houston. Guests included the “last man on the moon” Gene Cernan, who commanded Apollo 17, and fellow astronaut James Lovell.…
The Speedmaster is now a very large family, with a lot of variants introduced over the years. The Speedmaster ’57 that Omega presented at Baselworld 2015, due to reach the market in August-September 2015, has a lot of the vintage looks of the original – the smooth tachymeter bezel, pushers without crown guards, the dramatically…
This is a lovely watch presented at Baselworld 2015, I think the Seamaster Aqua Terra 150M Good Planet by Omega. I only have my own photo to go on: it was very striking with its white dial and blue hands. I would guess that it has a stainless steel 41.5 mm case with 15 bar/150…
One of the themes that emerged at Baselworld 2015 was certification, with Rolex announcing that in addition to the COSC certification (which tests the movements, not the assembled watch) that they already use, they will run their own additional testing on the watch in the case, and Omega announcing their own new departure in this…
Omega and Apollo 13 was a success story that developed of its own accord, as it were, NASA choosing Omega as its mechanical back-up for timing purposes, and then the Apollo 13 incident, the film, and so forth. The brand’s relationship with James Bond on the other hand required time and major investments that enabled…
The Speedmaster Moonwatch “White Side of the Moon”is the third watch by Omega to have a case entirely in ceramic. It completes the series of the ceramic “Dark” and “Grey” Side of the Moon released in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Case, dial and pushers are in white zirconium oxide ceramic; the polished white ceramic bezel…
For those who like classical-appearance watches and can’t afford a Breguet, this piece by Tissot presented at Baselworld 2015 will be very interesting. Tissot already has a few Bridgeport chronographs in its range, featuring the usual three subdials on a classical face with Roman numerals and fluted bezel, but they are a combination of modern…
Company profile: Tissot was founded in 1853 by Charles-Félicien Tissot and his son Charles-Emile Tissot, and their earliest pocket watches were already original, including the first mass-produced timepiece, and the first to have a second time zone indication. From 1858 Charles-Emile began selling savonnette pocket watches (savonnette or savonette pocket watches have the crown at…
This Poetic Complication piece by Van Cleef & Arpels, Lady Arpels Jour Nuit Oiseaux de Paradis, has a mechanical automatic movement that has a 24-hour module specially developed for Van Cleef & Arpels, driving the dial that features a bird-of-paradise flower and a moon in diamond. The dial rotates once every 24 hours, slowly changing…
At SIHH in January 2015, Van Cleef & Arpels presented two new Poetic Complication watches. This piece, Lady Arpels Jour Nuit Coccinelles, has a mechanical automatic movement driving the hour and minute hands, with an additional 24-hour module powering a disc lying behind the over-dial featuring four-leaved clovers crafted in champlevé enamel. The lower dial…
Company profile: In 1895, Alfred Van Cleef, son of a gemstone-cutter, met Estelle Arpels, daughter of a gemstone dealer. And the consequence was the birth of a business, Van Cleef & Arpels, run initially by Alfred Van Cleef and his father-in-law Salomon Arpels. In 1906, after Salomon’s death, Alfred was joined by Estelle’s brother Charles…
HYT’s concept of watches with a fluid displaying the time in a capillary is original and a lot more complex than meets the eye. One of the problems that they had was that a coloured liquid tends to deposit colour on the walls of the capillary tube, which would of course defeat the purpose of…
Company profile: The original concept for HYT’s idea of watches in which time is indicated by two imiscible liquids driven by two bellows was devised by Lucien Vouillamoz in about 2002. A few years later, he was working with Patrick Berdoz and Emmanuel Savioz on the areas of patents and finance, and the first prototype…
Not many watches have been on the moon. Not many watches have saved lives. Not many watches feature one of the world’s favourite dogs. This piece has all three and so its attraction is obvious at first sight. It was issued to mark the 45th anniversary of the Silver Snoopy Award given to Omega for…
Company profile: What would later become Omega was initially a watch assembly business, a “Comptoir d’établissage” started by Louis Brandt at La Chaux-de-Fonds in June 1848. He was 23 at the time. Just two years later, he was making enough watches to warrant a journey by coach throughout Europe to establish an international distribution. On…
Company profile: Certina was founded in Grenchen by brothers Adolf and Alfred Kurth in 1888, initially making movements and components, but soon designing and making their own watches. Their first brand name was Grana, an abbreviation of Granacus, the Latin for Latin for Grenchen. Their earliest watches were pocket watches, and their first wrist watches…