I have seen many people asking, what strap would their watch originally have been sold on. The truth is: unless you can find the original advertisement or catalog entry for your watch, there’s no real way of knowing.
So, can you assume that a watch would’ve been fitted with a particular type of strap? Well, yes.
In this new series, we take on various watch-related questions, which have been googled by a large number of people.
Regardless of whether the question is good, ordinary, or just plain silly, we’ll try to answer it, either by digging through whatever we can or by stating the obvious.
Either way, you’ll have the answer you were looking for.
In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian explorer, along with five crew members set out on a journey from South America to Polynesia on a wooden raft. They set out to prove the possibility of contact between the civilizations of the two regions in ancient times.
The name of the raft was KonTiki.
Crew members of the KonTiki were supposedly equipped with Eterna watches. A reasonable choice, as for what it’s worth, Eterna was one of these few brands, that managed to get just about everything right, waterproof cases included.
Oddly enough, it’s not known if Heyerdahl himself was wearing an Eterna. The watch on museum display, labeled as the “expedition’s chronometer” (well, hardly a chronometer as such) is…a military issued Longines COSD “Tuna Can”. These were built by Longines for British paratroopers during World War II.
It’s unclear just what a British milwatch was doing on the wrist of a Norwegian explorer, however – in all likelihood – it could have been a military surplus purchase, as many milwatches were decommissioned and sold after the war.
Anyway, Longines didn’t make it into the history books as the brand of the watches worn by the KonTiki crew. Eterna, however, did.
This article is about the Speedmaster Professional watches of the 1980s, a difficult period for Omega.
With the introduction of the Mark II in 1969, the Speedmaster collection went far beyond the watch we all think of when someone says “Speedmaster.”
In 1957, Omega – catering to the growing demand for tool watches – released a “trinity” of what was intended as daily beater tool watches and back then, that’s exactly what it was.
The Seamaster 300, reference CK 2913, intended for divers.
The Railmaster, CK 2914, intended for engineers working in environments, where the exposure to strong magnetic fields would mess up a watch without proper shielding.
And the Speedmaster, reference CK 2915, initially a part of the Seamaster collection, intended as a watch for…well, just about everyone who would need a rugged chronograph on a daily basis, but – in the first place – for racing drivers.
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