A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE VINTAGE HEUER WRIST ICONS BY HOROLOGY EXPERT SIMON HUGHES OF FRASER BELL JEWELLERS
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE VINTAGE HEUER WRIST ICONS BY HOROLOGY EXPERT SIMON HUGHES OF FRASER BELL JEWELLERS
Monaco Carrera Autavia
Let’ s start with the historical importance of Heuer.
I’ ve been interested in collecting and dealing with vintage wrist watches for over 35 years and there are certain brands in my opinion that stand out from the crowd and Heuer pre-Tag is definitely one of the best out there.
Founded in 1860 by Edwin Heuer the Heuer brand was launched, producing timepieces to record time, making stopwatches and timepieces for all types of industries like motor and the military. Skip 100 years and Jack Heuer join the company in 1958, he was the great grandson of the founder of the company and became the CEO of the company for 20 years from 1962 to 1982. But we are going to focus on a particular period of time and that would be in 1969- the launch of three new( now legendary) watches. The Heuer Monaco model number 1133 named after the famous Monaco Grand Prix, which was a brand-new model for that year, along with two new variants of the Carrera Ref. 1153 and the Autavia Ref. 1163. At the heart of these three models is the famous Calibre 11 which claims to be the first automatic Chronograph movement ever made, which was in collaboration with Breitling as they often did in those days is the Swiss Horology world.
The Autavia( a mixture of the two words Automotive and Aviation). The Carrera was named after the famous La Carrera Panamericana race in Mexico. A notoriously dangerous race with a high fatality rate. It ran from 1950 to 1954 until it was cancelled due to safety concerns.
All three models had the winder on the left side of the case to indicate that it was an automatic movement as you did not have to manually wind the watch, and the pushers for the chronograph was on the right side of the case.
The Monaco was such a revolutionary design for that time, with a square waterproof case( again a world first, and was considered for the Moon missions but there was a concern auto watches might not work in zero gravity) apparently this is why Steve McQueen and Jack Heuer decided to use it in the film Le Mans in 1970 as it would stand out on the big screen, but unfortunately Mr McQueen would not allow Heuer company to use his image for advertising, which I think was a real shame as it was not a success and was discontinued in 1974, which is ironic as it’ s probably, in my opinion, one of the most iconic wrist watches ever made, even Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick had one on the set of The Shining and Sammy Davis Jr on his Vietnam troop support gigs. It was replaced by the new model called the Silverstone Ref. 110.313 with softer squared edges and the new improved Calibre 12 movement.
They were bought out in 1985 by TAG- an acronym for Techniques d’ Avant Garde- the F1 engine tuning group.
McQueen’ s screen worn Monaco sold for $ 2.2 million in 2020- a world record for a Heuer.
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