October 11, 2004, 23:09
Lindell V. RiddleHi David,
WELCOME TO CHAPTER 185... you'll find a lot of friendly people here!
About over-jeweled, and non-functional jewels in watch movements, the all-time silliest one was probably a "100-Jewel" Waltham made in the 1950s. As you might image most of them served no real purpose. Seems they drilled 84 holes in the outer edge of the rotor and put 83 so-called "jewels" in 83 of the 84 holes. When you add the 83 around the rim of the rotor to the 17 in the ETA Movement you'll total the magical "100-Jewels" claimed for the watch.
Maybe they'd originally intended to claim "101-Jewels" and thought better of it! In fact the rotor itself is not jeweled in the center which of course would have been considered functional. The only purpose for all those "jewels" around the edge of that rotor might be to avoid momentary metal to metal contact if the watch were to be slammed hard.
I suspect your "59-Jewel" watch has an almost as silly an arrangement. As you are probably aware, anything over the 23 to 25-Jewel area in a normal automatic wristwatch watch is getting ridiculous. The legendary Webb C. Ball maintained that anything above 17 or 19-Jewels might actually be counter-productive in RR Time Service for 16 and 18-size Pocket Watches.
Hope the images to follow are interesting and helpful.
Again, welcome to our friendly group,
Lindell
An "83-Jewel" rotor from "100-Jewel" Waltham watch...