180 YEARS OF

WATCH HISTORY | e Milestones
1932
One Watch,
Two Dials
DUO DIAL
e Great Depression in the early
1930s took a toll on Longines, where
workers were obliged to accept a
20- percent wage reduction, higherranking
employees’ salaries were
slashed by 30 percent and executives’
paychecks shrank by fully 40 percent.
In this crisis-fraught era, Longines put
its hopes in a new product designed to
combine functionality and elegance.
It had become fashionable in the 1930s
for wristwatches to display the hours
and minutes in the upper portion, and
the seconds in the lower part, of rectangular
dials, but Longines wanted to
do more than merely follow the
decrees of fashion. e brand put the
crowning touch on this type of display
by creating a case with two separate
windows. is not only made a new
impression, but also reduced the danger
of breakage for the fragile crystals.
Of course, a wristwatch of this sort
called for a special movement. e
work of developing the elongated,
rectangular (26.6 x 15.5 mm), handwound
Caliber 9.32 began early in
1932. A shock-absorption system safeguarded
the pivots of the balance sta
against breakage. e large screw balance
and self-compensating Breguet
hairspring oscillated at a frequency of
18,000 vph. e rectangular case, with
engraved indices around the windows,
was available in various materials.
Longines targeted as potential
customers for this watch physicians,
nurses, scientists and everyone else
who needed a watch that clearly displayed
the passing seconds. Alongside
this avant-garde model, there was also
a conventional open version.
1938
Quick
Return
STOP SECONDE
An elapsed-seconds hand that can be
started, stopped and returned to zero
independently of the ordinary time
display is among the most salient
features of every chronograph.
Whether this hand sweeps its
circles from the center of the
main dial or across the plane of
a subdial matters little, and the
presence or absence of counters
for elapsed minutes and
elapsed hours is also unimportant.
Less complex than the other
chronographs, which Longines produced
in great variety, was Caliber
12.68Z Stop, a 17-jewel movement that
the brand launched in 1938. The number
“12” in this caliber’s name stood for
its diameter: 12 lignes or 27 millimeters.
A button at 2 o’clock triggered the central
elapsed-seconds hand to quickly return
to its zero at the user’s command.
This quick return, now known as a flyback
function, was accomplished by
connecting the trigger button to a zeroreturn
lever on the classic zero-return
heart of the central elapsed-seconds
hand. Horizontal coupling created the
connection to the fourth wheel. The
chronograph could not be stopped; its
user had to be satisfied with restarting
it at the correct time. A version of the
caliber was also available with a simple
stop-seconds function; another, with an
additional 60-minute counter (also from
the center; see illustration), debuted in
1939. The Stop Seconde was available
in elegant and sporty models.