Linear Classic: A Remarkable Golden Bridge Watch, From Corum

Corum is a company which, like the industry itself, has had a lot of ups and downs since it was founded in 1955, by René Bamwart and Simone Ries, in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. It’s not a brand that’s top of mind for many watch enthusiasts, especially those of us who may be a little newer to watch collecting and the watch world, but the company is a sort of hidden treasure trove of interesting and historically important designs. The Admiral’s Cup and Bubble watches are a couple of its most recognizable pieces, as well as its gold coin watches, but its signature model is without a doubt, the Golden Bridge.

The Golden Bridge has existed in a huge number of variations over the years and has been produced in both hand-wound and automatic versions. The Golden Bridge is a watch that is more than most, all about the movement – a tiny baguette-shaped linear caliber, in which all the components are arranged in a linear fashion. The winding crown is usually located at 6:00 and in the classic Golden Bridge model, which is the one we have today for A Watch A Week, the movement is visible through sapphire crystals on the front and back of the case, and also through sapphire panels in the case flanks.

The Golden Bridge was invented by Vincent Calabrese, one of the co-founders, along with Svend Andersen, of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants, or AHCI, the association of independent watchmakers which counts among its members F.P. Journe, Raúl Pàges, Konstantin Chaykin, Bernhard Lederer, and many others who’ve collectively been a powerful force in shaping the modern world of independent watchmaking. Calabrese invented the Golden Bridge caliber in 1977 and it was commercialized by Corum in 1980. Calabrese is still very much active and continues to explore the theme of suspended movements – a variation on mystery clocks and watches, in a way – in his Spatial collection of watches.

The visibility of the Golden Bridge in the larger enthusiast community has waxed and waned many times over the years along with the fortunes of the company in general, but its a fascinating example of really original thinking in modern watchmaking. The movement is quite small – just 14.75 lignes x 5 lignes, or about 33.27mm x 11.279mm (the ligne is the archaic but traditional unit of measurement for watch movements although its use today is confined to watchmaking, button-making, and ribbon-makiing; if you’re really curious it is 1/12 of the old French pre-Revolutionary inch. Another unit of measurement done in by the metric system).

The case is in rose gold, and at 32mm x 50.5mm it’s not actually especially small, but of course, the general lightness of its construction as well as the slim lines of the movement, make it seem if not actually petite, certainly urbanely suave (if urban suavity is what you’re looking for in a watch, which more and more folks seem to be after these days, now that the integrated bracelet stainless steel sports watch craze seems to be dying down). It is not exactly a subminiature movement – the smallest mechanical watch movement in the world, the Jaeger-LeCoultre caliber 101, easily walks away with that prize at 14mm x 4.8mm – but it is an exercise in the art of horological miniaturization and nothing quite like it exists anywhere else in modern watchmaking.

Although the movement is not decorated in the traditional French-Swiss style we usually associate with fine watchmaking, it is still decorated and beautifully so. The ornate and slightly baroque motif is a lovely contrast to the almost Roman stolidity of the case, which is itself relieved by the sapphire panels.

There is considerable ingenuity in the movement layout. The keyless works for winding and setting are superimposed on the ratchet wheel and mainspring barrel, with the click spring visible off to one side. The layout is pleasingly symmetrical, with the balance at one end and the barrel at the other.

You might I suppose, object to the classic Corum Golden Bridge on a couple of grounds, one of which is its apparent delicacy and fragility, and another of which might be that it is a bit of a one trick pony. To the first I would say that if ever there was a watch which manifestly had exactly zero ambitions to be a sports watch, it’s this one; to the second objection I would say that if you’re going to be a one trick pony then it ought to be a hell of a good trick and I think the Golden Bridge movement is exactly that.

It has in short, quite a lot of what today’s evolving collector community wants in a watch – it is a design from one of the most important independent watchmakers, who helped make independent horology what it is today; it trades in elegance and refinement rather than in overbearing machismo; it is something genuinely different from almost everything else out there and its originality is not marred by striving for novelty for its own sake. As it turns out, along the road less traveled is a Golden Bridge.

See It Here