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The timepiece gentleman controversy1/6/2024 Mischner claimed Owens showed him the photograph and told him: 'That was one of my most beautiful moments.' Owens, who felt the newspapers of the day reported 'unfairly' on Hitler's attitude towards him, tried to get Mischner and his journalist colleagues to change the accepted version of history in the 1960s. Siegfried Mischner, 83, claims that Owens carried around a photograph in his wallet of the Fuehrer doing just that. Who’d wear the Longines Silver Arrow 3.Painted in a bad light: Adolf Hitler gives the Nazi salute in the stadiumīut now a veteran sports reporter in Germany has come forward to claim that, though Hitler did indeed leave the stadium after the race, it was not before shaking Owens' hand. Draper wristed Jaeger-LeCoultre (Reverso above), Rolex and OMEGA. Don Draper wouldn’t have worn a dated design from such a mid-market brand. The world of Mad Men starts in March 1960, four years after the Longines Silver Arrow’s debut. So unless one of our commentators can set me straight, I’m thinking the “winning” caseback design depicts an aircraft entirely of Longines’ imagination, perhaps drawn by a marketing maven’s seven-year-old (nice work on those stars Jimmy!). The elevator is in the wrong place (on the watch image), the real world plane’s fuselage was white (not silver) and “The first Arrow was rolled out to the public on 4 October 1957, the same day as the launch of Sputnik I.” That’s after the Longines Silver Arrow hit the streets. But it is a silver, arrow-shaped airplane.Īfter consulting my old TTAG colleague, whiskey blogger and airplane nut Nick Leghorn, the only arrow-named delta wing aircraft aircraft from that era we can find is the Canadian CF-105 Arrow. The Silver Arrow’s caseback features a delta-winged jet flying into the heavens – hardly a motor racing-inspired motif. Superstitious watch buyers need not apply. Linking the watch to the ill-fated MB team a year after the horror would have been bad juju. Mercedes retired from Formula One in 1955 after the LeMans disaster claimed 83 lives and injured 180 more. Really? I hope the watch’s nomenclature had nothing to do with the Daimler-Benz AG “Silver Arrow” race cars. Blass, “The name stemmed from a contest within the company to name the watch, and among 450 proposals ‘Silver Arrow’ was the winning moniker with the name deriving from the dominant German racing cars of the era.” The hype surrounding the original 1956 Longines Silver Arrow is dubious. Longines’ caliber L888.5 (base ETA 2892) movement motivates the hands, complete with an anti-magnetic silicon hairspring and 72-hour power reserve. I’d like to see the Silver Arrow in the flesh before passing final judgement, but the PR shots make the watch look like nothing so much as nothing so much.Īlong with the bigger bezel and the new “cupcake” crown, the mechanical bits are thoroughly modern. The extra bezel girth creates a fatter looking timepiece than the original. As no latter day Mad Man would dare show up at a company-mandated Workplace Sensitivity Training session wearing a dress watch smaller than 39mm, Longines increased the case size from 35mm to 38.5mm and added 3mm width. You may notice the new Silver Arrow’s railroad track minute indices have a silver “frame” separating them from the hour markers. It’s yet another beautifully built example of Longines raiding its archives to position the brand upstream of the all conquering Apple Watch ( sitting on 100m+ wrists and counting). More charitably, you could call the new $2100 Longines Silver Arrow “unobtrusive ” and laud it for being faithful to the original design. “The dial is remarkably close to the original and really takes us back to a more elegant era – a time where people still wore formal attire when boarding a plane.” Either that or the Longines Silver Arrow is a slavish retread of a watch that remains as it was at the beginning: ditchwater dull. You’ll remember Don Draper as the hard-drinking, chain smoking, womanizing ad man in Mad Men. The Longines Silver Arrow is the watch that Don Draper would wear to the race track pronounces.
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