Hamilton Model 21 Marine Chronometer, ca. 1960
Watch
GUEST:
The clock originally belonged to my great-grandfather. He always talked about building a boat. We don't know when or where he got this from, but it was for the boat and he never built the boat. My parents had it for years. I think my mother wanted to get rid of it. You know, it was, like, a shelf-sitter, and my wife is a Army marine deck officer and drives ships, and so it was the perfect opportunity to pass it down to us.
APPRAISER:
This is a Hamilton Model 21 chronometer, a very precise timepiece. Chronometer is actually used for navigation. A clock that's used for navigation has to be very, very accurate, because latitude you can do fairly easily, but for longitude, you need a clock. This particular chronometer is a very important chronometer in the history of World War II. The Naval Observatory had the foresight to realize that we were going to go to the Second World War, and they approached a number of the American watch manufacturers. Hamilton designed this one, and they designed it in such a way that they could mass-produce it. And they also made it a little bit more accurate to what everybody else was building during the day. By 1944, they were making 500 of these a month. By the end of the war, they had supplied almost 11,000 examples of this particular model, 21, to the government. They stopped making this clock in 1970. This particular example was probably made somewhere in the 1950s or '60s. This has its original box. It's made in mahogany. Another nice feature about it is, it has this gimbal, but this would actually lock in place for transportation. But on a boat, you'll notice that it moves in all those different directions, and that's to help keep the instrument upright. This is a screw bezel, number of turns to take that off, and then you rotate this bucket back so that it falls out into your hand and very carefully, you grab it by the edges... (ticking) ...and that's the jewelry of the Hamilton Model 21. It's really a fantastic piece of machinery. And if you look inside, all the gearing is gilded. It looks brand-new, doesn't it?
GUEST:
It does.
APPRAISER:
Yeah. If you were to buy this at auction today, in the condition it is, which is in very good condition, you would probably have to budget somewhere around the neighborhood of $1,500 for it. This is something that you could still sail with today. If you knew how to do those calculations, you would get to where you were going.
Appraisal Details
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