Complaint about a pocket watch photograph

The readers of Popular Science in 1950 rightfully demanded accuracy for their 25-cents. After all, a quarter was worth $2.26 in today's money (using The Inflation Calculator). Yesterday, I posted a reader's letter of complaint about a wooden fish sculpture that Popular Science identified as a perch. When the reader pointed out that the fish did not resemble a perch, the editors of the magazine blamed the artist: "He calls it a perch."

Here's another letter of complaint from the January 1950 issue, about a remarkable pocket watch:

Take a look at the article referred to, from the July 1949 issue:

I don't know anything about sidereal time vs. astronomer's star time, but I do know that the editor's reply is insulting: "Reader Congdon's eyes are sharper than his imagination." Does it show a lack of imagination to point out an inaccuracy? This is a cruel jab designed to stun the reader into accepting the bullshit that follows: "various dials and hands [were] set in positions to show the greatest amount of detail." How does it show more detail to set the day of the week to "SUN," the month to "JUL," and the day of the month hand to "31" instead displaying a date that doesn't go back to WWI? And the small hands could be positioned almost anywhere without obscuring details. What do you think Congdon thought when he read the response?

Mistakes in magazines are inevitable (I've made more than my share as a magazine editor, and probably made at least one mistake in this very post), but editors shouldn't get upset when they are pointed out. Instead, they should thank the reader for taking the time to complain.

Here's my own complaint: Popular Science leaves us hanging -- "Only one more complex watch was ever made -- and it was stolen in 1942 and is still missing." C'mon - give us a little more!

All that aside, how cool is this watch? I wonder what happened to it? And who bought it? According to the Inflation Calculator, "What cost $30,000 in 1949 would cost $271,373.68 in 2010." Today, the Elon Musks of the world would casually chip off a microscopic fraction from their gold pile to possess such a timepiece, but who would have bought such an expensive watch in 1949? Share your thoughts in the comments.

[UPDATE: Boing Boing reader Teaninja found more info about the watch! Patek Philippe made it for banker Henry Graves Jr. in 1933. Most of the Wikipedia entry on Graves is about the watch:

An ardent watch collector, Graves was a patron of Patek Philippe, competing with James Ward Packard, the famed automobile manufacturer, for ownership of the most complicated watch in the world.[citation needed] In 1927, Packard commissioned the world's most complicated watch but not to be outdone, Henry Graves surpassed his rival in 1933 to become the owner of the most complicated watch ever made, spending 60,000 SF, nearly five times the price paid by Mr. Packard. It took over three years, and the most advanced horological technique, to engineer this truly one-of-a-kind timepiece; only one watch was ever built. Called "the Supercomplication", this pocket watch was held in the Museum of Time near Chicago, IL for years until it was sold for a record-breaking $11,002,500 to a secretive anonymous bidder at a Sotheby's auction held in New York City on December 2, 1999. The watch currently resides in the Patek Phillippe Museum in Geneva, Switzerland, and is the most expensive single piece on display.

• [Christopher]

  Forget who could have bought it then. I’d like to buy it now. Although even if were $30,000 in today’s dollars I still couldn’t afford it.

  This reminds me, though, of the time I saw an elegant old touring car in a showroom. An old woman who noticed me staring at it came over to me and said, “This is the car I dreamed of as a little girl.”

  I said, without any sarcasm or snarkiness intended, “This is the kind of car I dream of now.”

  • [Ladyfingers]

     I have no real interest in watches, but I was once paging distractedly through a doctor’s waiting room magazine and saw one I actually liked a fair bit. Really nothing remarkable at all, single dial, roman numerals, but all the proportions were just right, and the ivory tone of the face matched the strap in a subtle way. It was just right. I thought, hmm, I might buy that, and then read the caption.

    Patek Phillippe, 1942. $70,000.

• [Peter]

  “Only one more complex watch was ever made — and it was stolen in 1942 and is still missing.” C’mon – give us a little more!

  There’s not much else known about it, because there was a lot of trouble going on in the area, a lot of people had been turning up dead, and the police were naturally more busy with that than a simple theft.   They know that the watch was last seen in the possession of a weird man near a blue police box.

  The creator disappeared under mysterious circumstances too.  Nobody even knows his name, liked people to call him The Master for some reason.  I guess because he made such great watches.  His work was centuries ahead of everybody else in the field. 

  S’what they say.

• [royaltrux]

  I’ll stick with collecting telegraph keys, much more affordable. As for everything that watch can do, well, there’s an app for that.

• [ian_b]

  This was before 10:09:35 became the industry standard for analog timepiece photography. Chronograph dials are still the wild west, though.

• [Dominic Muren]

  Another really cool thing about this article is that it points out a weird semantic quirk of horology: The statement “World’s most complicated watch” is not a subjective statement. A complication, in relation to watch design, is a discrete thing!

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complication_(horology)

  I feel like we matter makers should bring this back – How many complications does a smartphone have?!

• [mccrum]

  What do you think Congdon thought when he read the response?

  “Christ, what assholes.”

  • [Boundegar]

    Then again, he’s the guy who saw an ad for a watch and started calculating the phase of the moon.  And then thought it was a good idea to write a letter to the editor.  And then actually wrote and posted it.

    • [Donald Petersen]

      And, no doubt, waited impatiently for the next issue to see what said editor had to say for himself.

    • [tubacat]

       He was reading Popular Science, after all. I think he was more than justified in expecting accuracy from that type of magazine, and that the editors were indeed jerks in their reply. Imagine the comments if the same picture were shown today in Discovery or Scientific American…

• [Robert Cruickshank]

  Interestingly, the figure of 271,373.68 is not out of line with what similar watches at the high end of watchmaking are going for today.  And yes, I know, you could fix some village’s water supply for that kind of dough.   If I had to guess who bought this one, I’d guess shipping tycoon. 

• [nixiebunny]

  It’s a standard photo shoot. The photographer doesn’t know nearly as much about time as the letter writer; he’s got a product shoot to wrap up. It’s reasonable to expect him to ask the watch’s handler to set  the hands to a photogenic arrangement. 

  But their answer was insulting.

• [Robert Cruickshank]

  Oh, and everyone should scroll down from the original story about the watch in the magazine, and have a look at the illustration for the article “Gus has a wild night.”  It’s really something. 

  • [Donald Petersen]

    I think I’ve seen that show before.

• [teaninja]

  Hey, I think I found this watch. Apparently, if this is the same, it sold at auction in 1999 for $11M!  http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/12/1202_most_expensive_timepieces/2.htm
  http://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/News/WATCHES-%26-JEWELLERY/2010-News-Archive/The-Collections-of-Henry-Graves/2277.page

  • [Robert Cruickshank]

     Awesome!

• [Merlin]

  sidereal time is the time as measured by how long it takes a particular  star to pass a point on the nights sky. it is one of the more accurate methods of time measurement doe to the regularity of the rotation of the night sky from our perspective. hence why astronomers use it.

  this kind of Watch would probably go for several millions in todays market. It is certainly the most complicated Ive seen anywhere.

  The errors in set up for the watch seem odd to me as well. either this was a simple assembly for photopurposes only or the front and back photos were taken at different times. why that owuld be is beyond me.

  to be honest I doubt that the writer of the letter thought much of the response from the editor. anyone of sufficient knowledge to discern latitude and longitude from observation of the dial would know that the response was meaningless.

• [Guy Cookson]

  I love the way you’ve rushed to this guy’s defence 62 years later.

• [naught_for_naught]

  Jiminy!  I’ve been waiting for 62 years for someone to take that loutish boor from Popular Science to task.  Just one thing though, young man, do you have to use so much profanity?  It makes you sound like a dancehall ruffian.  Think of your parents, for pity’s sake.

• [David Harvey]

  It’s the Graves Supercomplication Watch, custom made by Patek Philippe for New York banker Henry Graves in 1933.

  It was sold at auction by Southeby’s in 1999 for $11,002,500, the highest price ever paid at auction for a watch.

• [Cort Moore]

  The watch was bequeathed to the American Watchmakers Institute and later sold back to Patek Phillippe for 11 mill. It is a very famous watch. I loved seeing that article. 
  -Cort (aka 4thdimension)

• [An Infinitude of Tortoises]

  Something tells me there was a certain overlap between the readerships of Popular Science and Astounding Science Fiction….

• [Mark]

  If anybody happens to know what typeface was used in this clipping, I’d be very grateful to know.

• [ROSSINDETROIT]

  Complicated watches can be a pain to set.  I once sold a Corum Mariner Tides Watch to a customer who wanted all of the tides displays correctly set.  But we’re in Detroit and there are no tides tables because there’s no ocean.  So I used tides tables for the Fla panhandle, which will be correct if the oceans ever rise 1,000 feet.

• [Jer_00]

  “What do you think Congdon thought when he read the response?”

  He probably thought something like “Wow, they actually published my letter!  Look – it’s  my name there and everything.”  Followed by “huh – that’s kind of a stupid reason to mess with the settings.  But they published my letter!”

  Getting your letter published in a widely read magazine was still a fairly big deal when I was a teenager in the 1980s.  I’m told that it was an even bigger deal in the 1950s and I can only imagine that for the kinds of people who read and wrote letters to Popular Science it was probably huge.

  Also I think editors were a lot more dickish in their responses towards people back in the day.  There wasn’t so much a sense of “if I piss this guy off he won’t be a customer anymore” and more an aura of “I’m the authority and you’re paying me for my expertise – if you don’t like my attitude then piss off”.

• [jackdavinci]

  Surprised you are sticking up for the letter writer. His needless pedantry comes across as much much more dickish than the editor’s response. It’s a common industry practice to pose and or preserve objects when photographing them, and it makes more sense to optimize a model for maximum visual benefit than for some strange notion of scenario propriety. There’s no reason for the watch to display an accurate scenario unless it’s part of the continuity of a film. This wreaks of Comic Book Guy syndrome.