FROM THE EDITORS Letters + Events
The TAG Heuer
Monaco 1999-2009
Special Edition is
the fourth of five
new watches
celebrating 50 years
of Monaco.
Gary George Girdvainis
FIFTY YEARS LATER
Publisher | [email protected]
ike the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper declaration “it was 20 years ago today,” the watch collector’s lyric for 2019 might be
“it was fifty years ago this year.”
While most watch aficionados are familiar with the quartz crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, more sophisticated
collectors look beyond the rise and fall and rise again of electronic timekeeping and are aware of certain turning points in
horological history.
L
The early 1900s saw the beginning of the end for the pocket watch as the Heuer’s Monaco was reborn in various, often race-inspired liveries throughout
previously “effeminate” wristwatch gained masculinity and popularity via basic the years -with the orange and blue Gulf team colors leading the pack.
convenience as they became robust enough for both war and sport. The early
While the Speedmaster and the Monaco were aesthetic archetypes, a new
1980s saw a return of style after a slavish decline of creativity in the 1970s when mechanical technology was also presented in 1969 in the form of the Zenith El
quartz accuracy and digital displays overshadowed the nature of a watch as an Primero movement. This first publicly available iteration of an automatic winding
expression of personal taste and style. chronograph able to record and display interval timing down to 1/10th of a
Between these two major shifts and just prior to the rapid transition to the
second was an amazing achievement made possible by the new high speed
electrically excited oscillations of the quartz crystal, watchmakers in the late 36,000 bph frequency of the El Primero escapement. One could argue that this
1960s were still actively engaged in the worthy pursuit of mechanical accuracy. was a truly a legitimate pinnacle (zenith?) for the chronograph type because
A duality of engineering and design pinnacles were reached in 1969. Of course even though newer inventions in wristwatches can time even smaller increments,
these were quickly overshadowed by the umbra of electronic timekeeping, but the reality is that human reaction time ranges from .15 to .25 seconds, making
well worth celebrating fifty years later. any accuracy gains beyond 1/10th of a second a moot point in a human-
Of course we all know Omega went to the moon with the Speedmaster on
controlled device.
board the Eagle that landed. This unique notoriety was a marketing coup that
drove the Speedmaster into mass awareness and led to numerous variations on a Happy 50th to our watchmaking Icons.
simple sports theme that has placed the Speedmaster in a realm of its own. Keep Watching!
A more earthbound icon also born in 1969 was the Heuer (pre-1985
acquisition by TAG/Techniques d’Avant Garde) Monaco. Seen on the racing wrist
of Steve McQueen among others, the square-cased design gained popularity to
become one of the most recognizable watches ever made. Like the Speedmaster,
4 | INTERNATIONAL WATCH | FALL 2019