WAKMANN "FRANCE" Black Dial Chronograph 1950s

Timegrapher +60s/d 255° 1.5ms

The Wakmann chronograph presented here is built around the Venus Caliber 178, the column-wheel movement that also powered the earliest Breitling Navitimer. Seventeen jewels, 18,000 vibrations per hour and three counters — running seconds at nine, a thirty-minute register at three and a twelve-hour register at six — place it among the most capable hand-wound chronograph calibers of its era. Wakmann-signed examples of the 178 are considerably harder to find than their Breitling counterparts, as the brand more often turned to economical Landeron ébauches.

The 37mm stainless steel case is unadorned: a flat bezel, straight lugs and pump pushers, with a snap-on back carrying the hairlines of a life actually spent on the wrist. At 44mm from lug to lug the proportions read larger than most watches of the period, and the absence of ornament leaves the dial entirely in charge.

The black dial is printed with a spiral tachymeter graduated to one mile and an outer fifth-of-a-second track, the luminous Arabic numerals aged to a warm cream against the matte ground. Beneath the twelve-hour register the dial is marked FRANCE — the detail that ties this watch to Wakmann's French production, and the same word struck into the movement beside the WOG import code.

Completing the watch is a vintage steel bracelet, carefully matched to the case and to the period. It fits wrists up to 18cm, and the 18mm lug width leaves the option of a strap open.

Purposeful, uncommonly well specified, and unmistakably vintage, this Wakmann carries a mechanical pedigree that its modest signature never advertises.

HISTORY
Icek Wakmann began as a distributor of Swiss watches in Portugal in 1943 and moved to New York in 1946, founding the Wakmann Watch Company as Breitling's American agent. The following year the two firms entered a joint venture that would become Breitling Watch Co. of the US, and Wakmann went on to supply cockpit clocks to Douglas, Lockheed, KLM, BOAC and American Airlines. The French chapter of that story is less well known: a 1945 postcard sent from Wakmann in France to Willy Breitling concerned the founding of a factory there, established in the aftermath of the war.

Watches from that French production were exported to the United States bearing WOG, the import code shared by Breitling and Wakmann, struck into the movement alongside the word FRANCE. The same marking appears on the dial of this example. That a Wakmann from that workshop should carry the Venus 178 — the caliber of the Navitimer — makes it a distinctly uncommon survivor.

- wrist size in our picture is 17cm circumference -