Vulcain gold wristwatch with Jules Jurgensen band, $1
What's that? You've never heard of a Vulcain watch? This Swiss watch company was started back in 1858, and is headquartered today in Le Locle, Switzerland. One of the Vulcain's claims to fame is the fact that back in 1947, they developed the first operational alarm function on a wristwatch.
This interesting alarm innovation earned the Vulcain wristwatch its reputation with American presidents starting from Harry S. Truman. Since that time, most all American presidents have owned a Vulcain wristwatch! To the untrained eye, though, this find was simply an old watch with a broken crystal that that someone had thrown into a baggie and tossed onto the table at a yard sale. Nothing special at all. The first thing I noticed about this old Vulcain watch is that in spite of its cracked bezel, it still actually worked when I wound it up!
Take a look at the face of this watch in the closeup photo and notice the scrape mark that the hour hand (which is closer to the face than the minute hand) has left on the watch face as it has gone around. The Vulcain name is even scratched up, and the paint is actually stuck to the edge of the hour hand! It's very possible that the impact that left the crack in the crystal was so severe that it actually caused the face of the watch to shift forward until it was stopped by the hour hand. This isn't treally an important observation, but I thought I'd mention it.
The next thing I noticed about this watch is that it was still shiny. One of the few things I remember from grade school is that gold is the only metal that doesn't react with oxygen, which means that it doesn't rust, corrode, oxidize or tarnish. If you've ever watched a television show with shipwreck divers recovering gold bars and coins, you may have noticed that even though that gold has spent hundreds - or even thousands - of years immersed in one of the most corrosive natural environments imaginable, it's still just as bright and shiny as new.
Of course, gold plating doesn't tarnish either, but it does rub off. And since gold is so soft, unless the plating is very thick, it tends to come off relatively easily. Unless a watch spends its life in a dresser drawer, the thin, soft gold plating will be scuffed, scraped, scratched and rubbed as its wearer drops it, bumps it into stuff and sticks his hand into his pockets full of change on a regular basis. Scratches and scrapes reveal the metal underneath the plating, which almost always tarnishes or corrodes. See where I'm going with this?
Now, notice the series of marks (not the scratches) on the back of the watch. First, there's the 158, which is known as the 'Responsibility Mark,' and which we can ignore because it means nothing at all to us. But note also the 14K, and the 0.585 right under it, which is simply another translation of the purity of the gold used. As you're probably already aware, pure gold is referred to as 24 Karat, or 24K. The problem with gold is that it's so darned soft and malleable that you can't really use it to make anything. The list of metals that are used to alloy gold is a long one, but the one we're most familiar with is copper, which helps gold maintain its nice gold color. 14K simply means that the metal is 14 parts gold and 10 parts other metals, and a little math (14 ÷ 24 = 0.585) will tell you that the alloy is 58.5% pure gold.
Notice that nowhere on this watch do we see the usual 'gold filled,' 'gold plate' or 'base metal bezel' that we're used to seeing on cheaper watches.
Now, what the heck's up with that little squirrel? You don't really have to worry about him, he simply represents one of the Old Official Swiss Hallmarks, where the squirrel was used to represent 14K gold. They also used the goat, flower, duck, lynx, rabbit and wood grouse, among other critters, none of which we really have to know about.
Another interesting thing about this watch's back side is the series of scratches that were left by some goober when he tried to pry off the watch's back at some point in the past (possibly to try to repair the damage caused by the whacked crystal and the hour hand scraping on the face). He apparently wasn't a jeweler, because his unsuccessful attempts with what must've been a pocket knife or an icepick left lots of scratches all over the back of the watch. But notice something else - there's no tarnishing or corrosion at all, even though this part of the watch is normally in constant contact with moist, sweaty skin. The lack of corrosion is because the goober simply scratched into the solid gold, not through it and into cheaper metal underneath.
A look at the back side of the band reveals another sign on money - Jules Jurgensen. The company was started in Denmark way back in 1740, and is renowned for having made some of the finest and most expensive waches around. Although Jules Jurgensen is no longer in business, many of the company's wristwatches are still circulating around out there, just waiting for you to come and find them. So a Jules Jurgenson band on a Vulcain wristwatch is an interesting find, to say the least!
A final thing to note here is that word INCABLOC on the watch face, which I have to mention here because you'll see the word on many older watches. Everyone who's ever seen the face of a mechanical watch has likely noticed the term '17 jewels' written on the face. Mechanical watches employ lots of wheels and gears, and unless the shafts that support these wheels and gears are mounted in almost friction-free bearings, the watch simply cannot overcome the friction in order to operate. The solution that offers the very lowest amount of friction is to secure the shaft ends in tiny synthetic sapphires or rubies. The problem with this arrangement is that even though these gears and wheels are very tiny, their mass is quite large compared to the size of the jewels that support them. This means that a bump or drop can damage the supporting jewel, rendering the watch inoperative. The Incabloc system simply allows the jewel to flex out of the way in the case of an impact, allowing a thicker metal collar to take the impact stresses.
There you have it - a neat gold watch for a dollar. What else can you ask for? This watch sold on eBay for $148, back when gold was around $400 an ounce.
