This must have been popular in the days past. I have seen a few marked 21 Jewels and the style is always the same.
Crooked marketing?

Aaron

Crooked aftermarketing I would think!



Kenny

I agree Kenny.
Brian C.

pwpartsetc@pwatch.com

Of course, no one knows when the "21 Jewels" marking was added
to the watch above, but very clearly it is not an original factory mark.
Assuming that such a mark was made while the company that made
the watch was still in business, however, my guess would be that the
company wouldn't have been very happy about it.

By way of illustration, I'll relate a brief story from my early experiences.
The old guy who taught me how to work on watches, had in his shop a
plethora of "parts movements," which are what watchmakers use as
their private stock of hard-to-find parts. As I was looking through the
various movements one day, I happened across a Rockford "dome model"
which was marked "17 Jewels," much in the same way the watch above
is marked "21." When I asked the old guy about it, he told me that when
times got hard at Rockford, shortly before they went out of business, they
marked a lot of their watches with higher jewel counts than they really had.

At the time, I just accepted that explanation, and filed it away as an
interesting obscure fact. Once I learned a bit more about watches, however,
it eventually dawned on me that the "dome models" were Rockfords first
attempt to produce 16s watches, and they were introduced more than 30
years before the company went out of business. Obviously, that conflicted
with the explanation I'd been given, but when I mentioned that to the old guy,
his opinion was unchanged. He never liked Rockfords because of that one
erroneous idea about them, and to this day, I don't know where he got it.

In any event, marks like the one above were clearly added by unscrupulous
dealers, not by ANY American watch company. Although movements so
marked are clearly "defaced," they still make for something of an interesting
horological curiosity in my opinion, if nothing else but to illustrate that fraud
and deception in the watch business are not modern innovations.

===================

Steve Maddox
Past President, NAWCC Chapter #62
North Little Rock, Arkansas
IHC Charter Member 49