Longines is a great company. They treat you like royalty there. Today I woke up too early, I am on my way home. Special thanks to Andy and Ubik who treated me as comrads and gave me a lift back during rush hour! Special thanks to Mr T. from Copenhagen, Jennifer, and John Goldberger View attachment 582415 Jennifer Bochud made the arrangements for me to meet Bernard to get my dial authenticated. His judgement is the final decision on a dial. View attachment 562094 The radium dial was tested and authenticated correct by Bernard Portal and John Goldberger and witnessed by half a dozen collectors. Hands should be blue and crown of course not authentic according to Benard the head of the World Heritage Workshop. Dial is all original unaltered as was leaving Longines factory in 1936 Longines has developed LEA and a photo database to compare dials at the Workshop.
Here’s a hint of LEA Bernard showing LEA LEA has build dates and info including dial archives with links to catalogues. There are spec sheets and records of customer repairs too. They keep before and after photos of all work done.It is both research tool and records keeping of new work done.
By the way, this is what top teir collectors wear to the meeting. And the hotel was amazing. Note: not one of the gems are mine...
Another group of ultra rare Hattori and Weems watches at the dinner. Japanese Imperial Army/Navy Longines, mine is the pocket watch. The black one is not Japanese military, but extremely rare.
Thanks for sharing about this visit! I presume LEA stands for Longines Electronic Archives? Glad that they are now digitizing their invaluable archives! Would it eventually be available for collectors to search against?
LEA is Longines Electronic Archives. No direct public use. It requires knowledge of how to read Longines shorthand. There are many many codes. You must know the codes to understand for the original archive images.
We normally don’t know about all the...I’ll call them BOM numbers and references. Order numbers, case numbers, movement calibers, dial references, customer references, spec numbers. The reason it takes several days to get an extract is because it is labor intensive. Please appreciate the hours spent on one extract! Half a dozen new staff hired to keep up. 50 new requests per day!
Thanks @Seiji ! Indeed a testament to Longines dedication to their heritage. But I can't help but wonder if Longines could leverage on machine learning and AI to greatly hasten the record digitizing and free up the staff to do much valuable research scholarship. All said, greatly appreciate the ladies at the Longines archives for tolerating us insatiable collectors!
Beautiful watches there, thanks for posting. Happy for you that your 13ZN got a clean bill of health, it's a lovely looking watch.
For me the quality of anyone does not depend on whether they can tell a dial from another but in the purity and honesty of their efforts. We all end up in a grave some day and watches are very unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
We didn’t get a factory tour, but we saw the museum and the World Heritage Workshop where they restore the vintage watches. So as not to upset the collectors, I won’t say what we saw other than wow. I left one of the rarest pocket watches I have there because they have the incredible dial from 1890s. Longines has made a strong commitment to vintage. They are even restoring serial number 5xx. That’s right, in the 500s out of 50,000,000 watches produced.
BIG thank you, Seiji, for showing us your wonderful experience, and highlighting the work that the historical staff do so well. Delighted to hear about your chrono as well; are you saying that the sub and sweep hands should also be blued originally?
Beautiful post and impressive watches. I´m a big fan of the vintage pieces of the brand so I enjoyed this very much. Thanks for sharing.