Current collection
Chronoswiss
Régulateur
- Case
- Stainless steel
- Dial
- White
- Era
- 1988
The class of 1988
The story
Three watches in this collection date from 1987 and 1988: the Longines Hour Angle, this Chronoswiss, and the founding year of Daniel Roth. It was not planned, but it makes sense. Those were the years when a handful of people decided mechanical watches were worth making properly again, before the market agreed with them.
Gerd-Rüdiger Lang built Chronoswiss on that bet. The Régulateur put the hours, minutes and seconds on three separate axes, a layout borrowed from the precision regulator clocks watchmakers used to set their work by. He made it a wristwatch, in series, in steel, when almost nobody was doing anything of the sort. In white on steel it is the least expensive watch in my box that I would call historically important.
Details with a purpose
Notes on the watch
- The Chronoswiss Régulateur of 1988 is regarded as the first serially produced wristwatch with a regulator dial, and it made the regulator a wristwatch genre.
- Founded in Munich in 1983 by Gerd-Rüdiger Lang, a former Heuer watchmaker, at the low point of the mechanical watch industry.
- Separate hour subdial at twelve, central minutes and seconds subdial at six; the original layout of precision regulator clocks.
- Stainless steel case with the house onion crown and coin-edge bezel.
Collector to collector
Thinking about a Chronoswiss?
Send me the reference and what you are weighing up. We can talk about the details, the trade-offs and how it might fit your collection.
Gallery
