VERY RARE NITON 18kt YELLOW GOLD RECTANGULAR JUMPING HOUR WRISTWATCH Circa 1930s

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VERY RARE NITON 18kt YELLOW GOLD RECTANGULAR JUMPING HOUR WRISTWATCH Circa 1930s:
$10500.00

Niton Jump-Hour, Genève, circa 1930s

The present watch you are viewing is a very rare & very sought out Niton Jump Hour from the 1930s. Niton was commisioned by the likes of Patek Philippe, Cartier, Lange & Sohne to the name a few. Niton were masters in creating jump hour movements and especially blossomed during the 1930s when Jump complicated wristwatches became especially popular. 

The Manufacture Nitron was founded on October 28, 1919 in Geneva as “Societé Collectiv Jeannet, Morel and Bourquin”, in the rue de Montblanc 19th partners were William- August Jeannet from Le Ponts de Martel, Edouard- Henri Morel from Geneva and Achille Alfred Bourquin from Bern.     Morel & Borquin were both first active at Vacheron Constantin. On the first of December, the man moved to Rue de La Servette on the other side of the station 24. On October 10, 1922, the company renamed the Manufacture de montres Niton.     A fourth partner joined the company in 1922, but the latter, called Samuel Raymond, left on November 12, 1933. In 1927, William- August- Jeanneret left the company and the company headquarters were relocated to “Rue du Stand 30”. In 1928, the company received first place for a pocket watch at the chronometer competion. It is noteworthy that one of the first wristwatches by A. Lange & Söhne was equipped with a work by Niton Among others with Niton caliber 5711 

Two-body, solid, polished and brushed, stepped bezel, gold screwed bars. Matte silver with painted Arabic numerals for the minutes and the seconds, aperture for the jump hour, minute hand on revolving disc. Blued steel second hands. Cal. 5711, 9\'\'\', stamped twice with the seal of Geneva Quality Hallmark, tonneau-shaped, rhodium plated, fausses côtes decoration, 18 jewels, straight-line lever-escapement, cut bimetallic compensation balance with eight adjustments, blued steel Breguet balance spring, index regulator. Movement signed, case numbered.  

18 jewels • silvered dial, aperture for hours, rotating disk for minutes, subsidiary seconds • 18k yellow gold rectangular case, snap-on back • movement & Case Signed. Mint and original Through-out.

2 year warranty from our watch store.

Dimensions:

Thickness 6 mm

Diameter 23mm x 37mm

length 38mm (including lugs)

The present lot sold for $17,250 CHF in April, 1992, lot 495 in Antiquorum, Geneva

This Timepiece has been recently serviced by and will come with a two year warranty from our store.

Additional Details about The Jump Hour Complication

As a brief introduction, a jumping hour watch is one that does not feature a traditional hour hand that sweeps the dial once every 12 (or 24) hours, but instead has a disc viewed through an aperture on the dial that jumps to display the next hour precisely as the minute hand reaches 60 minutes. The correlation between the earth’s rotation during a day and an hour hand slowly arcing round the dial sits well with our common model of displaying time, but a jumping hour watch plays on the way mankind has broken up the day into discrete hour chunks. The inclusion of an hour hand in continuous motion gives an easy visual representation of the relative position between the previous hour and the next one, whereas the jump hour aperture gives an explicit bookend between the end of one hour and the start of another. The combination of digital and analog displays is utilized to convey the time here.

Many famous clockmakers were experimenting with “wandering hours” in the 18th century and Josef Pallweber later patented his design for a pocket watch with jumping hours and minutes in 1883. His design was licensed to IWC amongst others, but the boom for jumping hour watches didn’t really come about until the 1920s and coincided with the Art Deco movement. The complication fell out of fashion and remained so until the 1970s when the jumping hour made something of a comeback in both mechanical and quartz form. Many of the cheaper examples from this period are actually direct read watches comprising discs for hours, minutes and seconds that are all in constant motion but viewed through windows so that only the relevant part of each disc is shown.

Part of the complexity of creating a jump hour movement is the regulation of power that is transferred to the hour disc. Unlike a traditional time display which uses a constant force regardless of position of the minute or hour hands, the “snap” of a jumping hour only needs a delivery power for a short period each hour when the mechanism engages.This sudden spike in required power potentially reduces the amplitude of the balance for the rest of the movement at this time, or increases it for the rest of the hour when no additional power is needed. A further potential problem to wearers is the precision with which the jump occurs; a slow or imprecise date change is forgivable to most people, but seeing the minute hand registering somewhere between 59 and 1 minutes during a jump would not be so easy to live with.

Solving these kinds of problems is usually the playground of high-end watchmakers—who often revel in doing such things just to show they can—which goes some way to explaining the limited choice for jumping hour watches especially when looking for one in the 1920\'s which is completely original and at a time where this complication begins to show up on the wristwatch and transition from its presence on the pocket watch.