Good evening all,

As I was looking at the display back of my Deville Chronograph and pondering life's great mysteries, it occurred to me I didn't know which Omega reference first housed the Coaxial movement.

I know the first coaxial movement available to the public was the cal 2500. Does anyone know which reference this caliber was used in?

 

First Omega coaxial?

Deville hour vision 8500 cal

http://www.wthejournal.com/en/news/view/10-things-to-remember-about-omegas-co-axial

 

You can see the first watch Omega sold with the Cal. 2500 co-axial movement in this pdf here:

http://www.swatchgroup.com/en/content/download/2632/100259/file/2010_08_22_omega_co_axial_en.pdf

Unfortunately they don't give the reference number for it, but it was a limited edition De Ville from 1999.

Cheers, Al

 

I believe this is the one Al is refering to. There's a platinum version with a salmon dial too, very nice

http://www.timezone.com/2002/11/22/review-omega-co-axial-deville/

they sell for about $8K these days if I'm not mistaken.

here's the salmon one..

 

Man, I remember when those came out...I was a serious vintage constellation pie pan fanatic at the time and I was very impressed....if only they offered a steel version...I would have one now.

 

A better question: Which was the first watch to correctly use the Co-Axial Escapement in the way it was designed instead of butchering it and stuffing it into an ETA caliber?

After all, if a watch is constantly stopping, it's a failure at doing it's primary job.

 

One could argue that the primary job these days has nothing to do with telling time...but that's a whole other discussion...

Examples exist where Daniels put the escapement in Rolex, Patek, Zenith, Omega, and F. Piguet (maybe more but those are the ones I know of) as he was shopping it around to various makers before he could find someone to actually jump in and buy the rights to his escapement. I presume those worked right, but who knows since it took him years to get someone to buy it...