Longines had already been making dashboard clocks and chronographs for the cockpits of early military planes when it began turning out wristwatches for their pilots in the 1920s. Once the Lindbergh Hour Angle had established its bonafides as a historically derived pilots’ watch with modern-day appeal - with the model eventually joining the brand’s modern lineup along with a revival of its historical contemporary, the Weems Second Setting Watch - Longines began to unearth other timepieces from its museum collection that were designed for pilots, many of them intended for military usage during the first and second World Wars. Thus was the seed planted for the revival of more pieces from Longines’s extensive, well-documented historical archives. Von Känel made the decision to produce a reissue of the Hour Angle Watch for the anniversary year, which, somewhat to the practical CEO’s surprise, was a hit. A modern Lindbergh Hour Angle watch from 2017 The watch’s groundbreaking, rotating-bezel design allowed pilots and navigators to calculate their longitude during long-distance flights - a necessity in those pre-GPS days - allowing them to home in on their geographic location quickly, efficiently and accurately. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh worked with Longines to produce one of its most historically significant timepieces, the first so-called Hour Angle watch, in 1931. Louis - an aviation milestone for which Longines served as official timekeeper on behalf of the World Air Sports Federation. That year, it was pointed out, was the 60th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 historic non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris aboard the Spirit of St. The Longines Heritage Collection as we know it today sprang from what must have seemed an oddball suggestion at the time, posed to Von Känel back in 1987, long before retro-look, vintage-inspired watches were the rage - several years, in fact, before the Swiss mechanical watch began re-emerging as a successful genre from the mire of the Quartz Crisis. They said, ‘We will produce what we want and you will sell it.’ We had to change this attitude and this philosophy to something more like, ‘We observe what the market wants and you produce it.’ It took us some time, but I think, overall, this was a good move.” This change in culture - adapting to what the market wanted - was essential to the venerable brand surviving the onslaught of quartz-driven watches from the Far East that threatened and in some cases crippled many of Longines’s Swiss competitors. “The motto at the time at Longines was that the technicians were the bosses. “The spirit of the company changed in the 1970s,” Von Känel, who retired in June 2020, revealed during a rare interview at the Longines offices in 2019. One does not hold on to such a role in today’s ultra-competitive luxury watch industry without having a strong grasp on what the customer wants - even if you occasionally need to be convinced. Of all the watch-world semicentennial milestones that were lavishly commemorated in 2019 - from the first quartz watch to the launches of the Monaco and El Primero - one such anniversary passed by relatively quietly: 50 years since Walter Von Känel joined Longines, founded and still headquartered in his hometown of Saint-Imier and for which he served as CEO starting in 1988. One watch brand, however, has been servicing this audience longer than most, and with a greater variety of styles: Longines, which traces its history back to 1832 and which began seeing the writing on the wall for the vintage revival as early as the late 1980s. Fueled by the growth of the pre-owned market and high-profile watch auctions, modern re-creations of vintage timepieces from the early to mid-20th century have proliferated across the industry for nearly a decade now, with just about every brand mining its past for pieces that might appeal to the retro-look tastes of today’s consumer. Trends come and go in the watch world, but the trend toward nostalgia has proven to possess more staying power than most. Much of the Heritage collection is inspired by vintage pieces in the Longines Museum in Saint-Imier, Switzerland In this feature from the WatchTime archives, we explore the origins, inspirations, and varied offerings of Longines’s ever-expanding Heritage Collection. The vintage-look trend continues apace, and one watch brand has devoted an entire family within its portfolio to resurrecting timepieces from its long and creative history.
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