Ben Clymer

In 08, he buys a movement, which is what powers a watch from a company called Aegler, A-E-G-L-E-R, which we'll get back to later.

They're still around kind of today.

Buys a movement, puts it in a case made by himself and sends it off to, it's called an observatory, but effectively what it is, it's a testing facility, effectively a nonprofit that says, these watches or time telling devices, clock, marine chronometer, whatever, are accurate within, we'll say X and Y, effectively saying,

These are the most precise time-telling devices on Earth, typically done for marine chronometers.

And if you know anything about the history of longitude, like that is effectively how longitude was discovered.

This is just kind of paramount to basically all exploration of the time period.

But up until that point, no wristwatches had ever even been submitted to this thing called the QA, which is a British testing facility at that point.

In 1908, he does that with an eggplant-powered watch.

It's a 44-day test, and it is given the QA certificate.

And again, nobody had ever done it.

Some years later, about 10 years later, he submitted 136 movements back to the QA.

And I think 24 of them were cased in 34 millimeter gold cases.

And then another 112 were in what we call boy's size, which is really very small.

I mean, at this point, it would look like a nickel.

But these are effectively the Formula One cars of watch movements.

So there were other watch movements at the time that, to you and me, most people would look exactly the same, but these were high performance calibers.

And they did it with a special escapement.

And escapement is basically how the time counting is regulated.

And these were effectively the Formula One cars of watchmaking.

And they were done in a way that was very, even back then, very Rolex.