A few weeks before the 2021 holidays I stopped over at my parent's house on a mission. My 17 year old niece is a fiction fanatic and I wanted to gift her a trilogy of paperback fantasy novels that I had read as a teenager. However, after college I had opted to leave the books at my parent's house as space was in short supply in my new (and very cramped) urban apartment.
Now my parents are borderline hoarders. I've never known them to willingly get rid of anything that might prove to be even remotely useful in the future. As my mom likes to say, "I'll need it the minute I throw it out!"
So I thought my chances of finding that paperback trilogy for my niece were pretty good.
Then reality intervened.
It turned out that my parents had converted my old room into a makeshift storage warehouse. It was packed nearly to the ceiling with archive boxes full of…well…stuff. Think of the ending of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, except on a much smaller scale.
I dived in, ultimately spending hours picking through the debris. I found everything from wicker baskets to a book on how to program computer graphics from the 1980s. But the fiction trilogy I was looking for eluded my search. I suspect that it was thrown out at some point.
It seems that although my parents like to save stuff, it is "their" stuff (and not anyone else's) that is important in the grand scheme of the universe.
I had struck out.
However, just as I was about to call off the search I noticed something glinting in the dark corner of a partially opened archive box. I reached down with anticipation and slowly pulled out a beautiful vintage Longines wristwatch housed in a solid 14 karat yellow gold case, circa 1950.
This was a surprising development for me, but not too surprising. You see, I have a knack for finding valuable things - so much so that I have occasionally been called a "truffle pig". I'm the sort of guy who randomly pulls an old sterling silver spoon or gold thimble out of a junk drawer, provided any are there to be found of course.
I gave the newly found watch to my parents declaring, "It's a Longines cased in 14 karat gold. That's a good old watch; hold onto it." After briefly examining the watch, my parents had an epiphany about it origins. This Longines had a family story behind it - one that I'll recount a little further on in this article.
But what a beauty this vintage Longines was!
Its solid 14 karat yellow gold case featured prominently flared lugs - a hallmark of 1940s to early 1950s Retro era design. The completely original (albeit somewhat stained) dial sported applied gold Roman numeral markers along with a period appropriate Longines logo. The sub-seconds - located at 6 o'clock - was absolutely typical for the time. Popping off the back of the case, I found the movement was a manual-wind, 17-jewel Longines caliber 9LT. The movement's serial number (7958924) indicated that it was produced in the year 1950.
An updated version of the 1940s era caliber 9L, the 9LT is a really interesting watch movement. Both calibers were workhorses of the Longines wristwatch lineup, yet hardly get a second look from most vintage watch enthusiasts today. In fact, it is difficult to find out any information about these movements at all!
But what I did discover was compelling.
Like most vintage Longines movements, the 9L/9LT family was produced exclusively in-house with no components sourced externally. These high grade movements were used in a wide range of Longines wristwatches, including those with stainless steel, gold-filled and solid karat gold cases.
I will quote an anonymous online vintage watch enthusiast on the charms of the 9L/9LT movement:
"I don't have experience with the exact movement, but look at it. It has solid gold chatons surrounding the ruby jewels. [Editor's Note: The chatons are undoubtedly only gold-plated, but still reflect a high quality finish.] Burnished teeth on the gears. All the plates are chamfered. It's Geneva Seal quality. Far nicer than a Rolex or Omega of the period."
In my opinion, the Longines caliber 9L/9LT is the equal of the classic IWC caliber 89 or the superb Hamilton 982M of the same period (the "M" stands for either "medallion" or "masterpiece", depending on who you ask). In contrast, Rolex movements of the era were generally considered sub-par in comparison.
A vintage Longines caliber 9LT
Photo Credit: Waha Watches
The family history behind my Longines watch find was no less interesting than its technical specifications. According to my father, this Longines wristwatch originally belonged to his father (my paternal grandfather). It was gifted to my grandfather when he "retired" from Koppers - a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based chemical company where he worked as a chemist. I put the word "retired" in quotation marks because my grandfather only left his job at Koppers when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in the mid 1950s.
My grandfather died shortly after leaving Koppers and bequeathed his prized Longines watch to my father. My father subsequently wore it during his high school years in the late 1950s/early 1960s until he carelessly broke the crystal once or twice. He never wore it again after that.
So our family's elegant Longines watch became a sleeping beauty, tucked away in a stuffy archive box for 60 odd years until its recent rediscovery.
Likewise, the Longines watch brand is an incredible bargain hiding in the dark corners of the world of vintage timepieces, waiting to be found and loved again.
Like nearly all good watchmakers, Longines' origins lay nestled deep in the 19th century Swiss alpine countryside. It was in the year 1832 that Auguste Agassiz and his partners founded the company in the town of Saint-Imier. At first the firm assembled parts from other manufacturers into finished pocket watches. But in 1867, Longines built a dedicated factory and started producing its own in-house movements. It would continue making its own movements until the late 1970s.
After experiencing tremendous commercial growth during the last few decades of the 19th century, Longines moved to safeguard its brand from unscrupulous competitors. The company filed its celebrated logo, a winged hourglass, as intellectual property with the Swiss authorities in 1889. This copyright protection was extended in 1893 when the Longines name and hourglass logo were registered with the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property. As a result, Longines has one of the oldest business logos in continuous use in the world today.
The firm's golden age began in the 1920s and ran through the 1960s. It was during this period that many iconic Longines wristwatches were introduced. These include the military aviator Weems chronograph (1927), the pilot-focused Lindbergh Hour Angle (1931) and the classic minimalist Flagship (1957). These models are very popular with vintage watch aficionados today and usually command strong prices.
Longines was also renowned for the superlative styling of its Art Deco/Retro era dress watches. Knotted, flared or stepped lugs complemented other venerable hallmarks of the age, including hourglass cases, pie-pan dials and applied Breguet Arabic numerals. These luxury watches were often housed in solid white or yellow karat gold cases, sometimes studded with diamonds.
My grandfather's 1950 Longines Retro era watch featuring a 17-jewel 9LT movement.
The Longines brand only began to decline in the public consciousness during the 1970s. This was the time of the Quartz Crisis in the Swiss watch industry, when cheap and super-accurate quartz watches largely displaced traditional mechanical movement watches. Many traditional Swiss watchmakers (and all the major American watchmakers) either went bankrupt or were sold during this time. Although Longines held out longer than most, it was eventually forced to merge with the Swatch Group in 1983.
This event was both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand it allowed Longines to live on when it probably would have gone bankrupt and liquidated otherwise. But it also meant that Longines was no longer an independent company. Swatch eventually determined that Longines would no longer develop or produce its own movements, but would instead use ETA movements. Although ETA makes robust calibers that are used by many different Swiss watchmakers, they do not have the same cachet and recognition that in-house movements do.
Another side effect of the Swatch acquisition is that Longines now found itself fighting with other Swatch brands for market share. In order to prevent its brands from cannibalizing each other, Swatch assigned each in-house brand its own "tier" within the organization.
For example, the Swatch brand is the lowest tier. These are quartz fashion watches with bold styling, bright colors and copious use of plastic. The price point of Swatch watches is typically between $50 and $100. The next tier up is Tissot, another Swatch Group brand. Then comes Hamilton, a once great American watch company that fell on hard times in the 1970s and was sold to Swatch.
Longines is next in line. It is positioned as a mid-tier brand within the Swatch Group - not super expensive, but not cheap either. This is a tremendous change from its heady days as an independent company when Longines was considered a luxury brand par excellence. But today both Omega and Blancpain sit above Longines in the Swatch Group hierarchy.
The storied history and outstanding quality of vintage Longines watches provide the collector of older timepieces with a unique opportunity. Because of its modern-day circumstances as a "mid-tier" watch brand, high quality vintage Longines wristwatches are surprisingly affordable. This is especially the case when their prices are compared to other peer or near-peer vintage watch manufacturers. In effect, antique Longines watches are great bargains relative to vintage Piagets, IWCs and Vacheron Constantins, among others.
For example, it is possible to pick up a freshly serviced 1960s era Longines Conquest or Flagship automatic cased in stainless steel for under $1,000 today. Meanwhile, a rather run-of-the-mill vintage Rolex Oyster Perpetual in stainless steel will generally run you anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000. As you can see, vintage Longines watches represent a compelling value proposition.
Vintage Longines Automatic Watches for Sale on eBay
Of course, if you care about the resale value of a vintage watch you are looking to buy, then brand matters. A strong brand equates to more demand and higher prices - just look at Rolex! But one of the great mistakes that watch enthusiasts make is to assume that brand is static - that today's leading brand must also be tomorrow's dominant brand. The fact is that none of us knows which watch companies and brands will be highly esteemed 40 or 50 years from now.
This leaves the watch investor with a fundamental dilemma.
Do we purchase a vintage watch based solely on the quality of its movement, attention to detail and overall workmanship or do we buy based primarily on brand image? Given that we don't know which brands will be in vogue decades hence, I tend to lean toward the former strategy rather than the latter. I find it satisfying to know that the vintage watch I hold is a miniature work of art - a marvel of technical engineering shrunk into a movement the size of a couple coins stacked on top of each other.
Although I do think quality ultimately wins this debate, one must always keep an eye on the brand in order to have a balanced perspective.
Happily, the vintage watch aficionado sacrifices very little when buying a fine old Longines.
The company's vintage movements were all designed and manufactured in-house. The fit and finish of its pre-1975 watches are universally excellent. Every style of Longines can be found - from formal dress watches to sporty tool watches. The history of the firm, setting aside its unfortunate post Quartz Crisis fall from grace, is impeccable.
Longines dress watches from the 1930s to the 1960s in solid karat gold cases offer exceptional value for money at the moment. These watches can be readily found in a dizzying array of case styles with either sub/center seconds or without them - the choice is yours. A wide range of stylistic choices are available in the $500 to $1,200 range. Solid karat gold Longines dress watches are criminally undervalued right now - a situation that can't persist forever as supply inexorably dwindles due to the demographic trends inherent to the estate industry.
Another solid investment choice is World War II era Longines Weems pilot watches. These are still available in reasonable states of preservation in the vintage watch marketplace for less than $5,000. Although the Weems design was widely licensed and produced by many different manufacturers of the era, the Longines version still offers excellent value for the money. This is remarkable considering that the Weems is the progenitor of today's ubiquitous sports watch styling. In fact, I believe there is more than a passing resemblance between the Weems and that most hallowed of sport watches: the Rolex Submariner.
The stylistic similarities between this first year of issue 1953 Rolex Submariner (ref. 6204) and this 1940 Longines Weems are striking. Most of the differences are superficial in nature, such as the Rolex's use of black enamel on the bezel or markers in place of numerals on the dial. Many of these altered visual cues can be purely attributed to translating an aviator watch into a dive watch.
Photo Credit: Bob's Watches & The Spring Bar
My final investment pick is Longines automatics from the 1950s and 1960s. Notable automatic models of the period include the Conquest, Flagship, Admiral and high frequency Ultra-Chron. Pre-1970 Longines automatics offer classic Mid-Century styling combined with standout movements (such as the illustrious Longines caliber 30L and 430 families). As an added bonus, some models offer date functionality. $800 to $2,000 will get you the pick of the litter in your choice of either a stainless steel or solid karat gold case.
Please note that not all of the Longines models listed above exclusively used automatic movements, so some discretion is necessary when shopping.
I would steer clear of any vintage watch (including vintage Longines) with a gold-filled or gold-plated case. The plating always wears through eventually, leaving an impaired watch that is difficult to sell for good money on the secondary market. Exceptions can be made for rare or otherwise exceptional watches (like an original Weems), but those are few and far between.
As always though, buy what you like. Just keep in mind that depending on your tastes, some vintage watch purchases may not be investments in the strictest sense of the term.
I will leave you with this excerpt from the website of a respected British vintage watch dealer that concisely sums up the Longines value proposition:
"For how long vintage Longines watches will remain such good value is anybody’s guess. They have risen steadily in worth over the last twenty years, but for no explainable reason have still retained their undervalued position in relation to the other major brands. A decade ago, the most informed London dealers were saying that pre-1960 Longines material just had to soar in price in the internet age, but it hasn’t happened. At the moment, experienced early Longines collectors live in a sort of smug parallel universe, where the most astonishing levels of quality can be obtained for a few hundred, or, in the very best cases, just a few thousand pounds and we have a feeling that’s exactly how they want things to stay. If the market ever wakes up to just how exceptional these vintage Longines watches are, we’ll all see auction results that are triple, or more, what these pieces command today. For the moment, for the thinking man who wants the ultimate in sharp aesthetic design and technical refinement without paying the high premiums associated with antique Rolex items, Longines is the perfect choice and cannot be recommended more wholeheartedly."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Vintage Solid Karat Gold Longines Watches for Sale on eBay
Post Script:
Much to my surprise and delight, my parents presented me with my grandfather's Longines as a Christmas gift a few weeks after I found it. A family heirloom had made its way into my hands.
Best. Gift. Ever.
I intend to have it serviced, cleaned and returned to working order. I feel it is important to preserve and cherish these keepsakes from our past. If we do not save them, then one day they will be gone - and our memories with them.
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