On the greatness of watchmaking, and the Omega 1894

Many years ago, in the long-gone late 1990s, when I decided to go back to graduate school to run my financial future, I used to go to the 26th Street Flea Market every Sunday in the hopes of finding a hidden gem. I found them regularly, but even as a hidden gem, the prices were often out of reach. I remember a huge, complicated Agassi pocket watch with enough gold in the case to fill half of Fort Knox—the price was basically the value of the gold, but the movement was so beautiful. I also found a watch by Lepine with a thin full-bridge movement that, despite his important place in watchmaking history, probably wouldn’t cost much more today than it did back then, decades ago.

However, one day, for reasons I can’t remember, I had a little more cash than usual, and I found a small, hand-wound Omega in a gold box. Today, I’d be skeptical of the dial, which is a little too clean, but it has the word “chronomètre” on the dial, just above the “Omega.” This is one of my early holy grail watches – an Omega chronometer from the 1940s with a calibre 30T2RG.

If you want a watchmaker’s opinion on the 30mm range of movements, Roger Smith had this to say in a 2004 interview with International Watch:

“In my opinion, the Omega 30mm is one of the best designed movements ever, from a contemporary point of view, and it has appeared in many different forms and types over the years. In horology, one always starts a new idea by taking the best from the past, and then you reinvent it. This Omega movement has been a constant source of creativity and inspiration, influencing my approach to the Series 2 movement.

In another interview with watchmaker Curtis Thompson:

“In my opinion, the best of these movements is the Omega 30mm. They are very well proportioned and for a production movement, there are no short corners in terms of construction quality. Due to these qualities, worn parts are rare, maintenance is a pleasure, disassembly and especially assembly are very simple, the movement almost falls together.

I bought the watch for $500 (the seller was not a watch expert, and when she quoted the price, she defensively said, “I think it’s made of real gold.” I took the watch home, cleaned it and oiled it, and it runs flawlessly despite being a 1940s watch. Smith was right. It almost put itself together. The chronometer version of the 30T2RG has a special precision regulator, while mine is an earlier movement with a split rim-compensated balance and a blued tempered balance spring.

I really couldn’t afford it, and about a year and a half after I bought it, I had to sell it – five hundred dollars is a lot of money for a student, especially when you have a small and growing boy who wants to be fed and clothed regularly. But to this day, it’s pretty much the only watch I regret selling, especially now that the idea of ​​finding a watch in good condition for five hundred simoleons is ridiculous (an old slang term for a dollar, but hey, it’s a vintage watch).

Last year, I happened to buy it at Crown & Caliber, and came across a watch I more or less forgot existed. The watch is basically a modern 30T2RG, or more specifically, the caliber 269 from the same family of movements. I stopped breathing. This watch is not from the forties. It was made as part of a limited edition for Omega’s centenary in 1994, using a new old stock movement that Omega had in its bank. It’s exactly what I wanted decades ago, and is a holy grail watch for me today – too much for a couple of kids in college, alas, but I did manage to more or less bully a friend into buying it.

There aren’t many words to say. Normally, I don’t struggle to find words to throw at watches I like, but in this case, it feels out of place – As if exaggeration were not only unnecessary but actually silly, if not downright naive, in the face of such horological self-sufficiency. This is one of the purest expressions of watchmaking, elevated to the level of art through a simple pursuit of excellence. I doubt whether this was Omega’s specific intention when the 30mm series of watches went into commercial production, but it seems to me that the purity and elegance of the case and dial are a seamless continuation of the purity and elegance of the movement – ​​an outward expression of inner beauty.

This movement has not been available for half a century. The 30mm movement series is long gone, but so is the entire genre of precision-made, rugged, hand-wound movements, intended not as mechanisms for luxury watches but as highly accurate, extremely rugged, easily serviceable movements designed to last a lifetime.

The late, great, and feared theatre critic John Simon once said of Cyrano de Bergerac: Bergerac) that it is not a great play, but simply a perfect play. He is being rhetorical, of course, because after opening with this observation, he spends the rest of the essay explaining why Cyrano de Bergerac is a great play (I have not yet seen the latest film version starring Peter Dinklage, but I want to, the only thing holding me back is that, like some watches, I fall in love with the version I see first). There are many watches that you might, no one would disagree with, call “great”, but the 1894, and the family of watches from which it derives, have no such pretensions, and that is what paradoxically makes them – for me anyway – among the greatest watches ever made.