Watch Wednesday (9/30/09)

Welcome back to another edition of Watch Wednesday (now actually appearing on Wednesday again, but subject to possible future schedule adjustment due to middle-aged brain malfunction). This time around the watch is an Accutron Deep Sea from 1970. The Accutron completes my personal trifecta of vintage watch obsession, as it was and is a sibling brand to the Bulova and Caravelle watches previously featured.

Accutron was started at the beginning of the 1960s as a showcase for Bulova's technological achievements in watchmaking (which, of course, could be sold at higher prices than even the fanciest Bulova models). The Accutron 214 movement was the world's first battery-powered watch, but quartz watches would not come to market for another decade or more. The battery supplied power to a movement that ran off the vibration of a tiny tuning fork; if you hold one of these Accutrons up to your ear, you can hear it humming.

Accutron produced mamy desirable (and now valuable) models, including the Astronaut, which had a 24-hour movement (the hour hand goes around the dial only once per day instead of the more typical twice), and my personal favorite, the Spaceview, which exposed the electronic movement to view by eliminating the dial altogether. I had a Spaceview a long time ago, pretty early in my collecting, but sold it some years back when times were tight. I've been looking for another one for a while, but they have gotten consdierably more expensive in the intervening years, and if I'm going to make that kind of investment again, I want to find exactly the right one.

The Deep Sea was marketed as a diver's watch, which is fairly obvious given its rotating countdown bezel and the depth rating of "666 feet" marked on the dial. Other cool features of this model: the Accutron tuning fork symbol at the end of the second hand, the red numerals on the date wheel, the magnified date window on the inner side of the crystal so that it doesn't protrude on the outside, and the crown tucked in unobtrusively at the four o'clock position.

I love this watch, but it has always run fast. It can gain a couple of minutes over the course of a work day, which isn't terrible, but it should run more accurately than that. However, when I took it out of the drawer to take the picture, it was about 30 minutes slow, so I have no idea what's going on. I may have to think about having it serviced.