The IWC F.A. Jones Portuguese ‘Jones Caliber’ Limited Edition Ref. 5442
A classic “pocket watch for the wrist” from IWC.
One of the most interesting details from IWC’s long history is that despite the fact that the company has been located in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, for the entirety of its history, its founder was an American. Florentine Ariosto Jones, in addition to having one of the most flamboyant names in the entire history of watchmaking, had been a director of the E. Howard & Co. watch and clock company before getting the idea, sometime in the mid-1800s, to combine American mass production methods for industrial scale watch production with inexpensive Swiss labor (Neither of those circumstances obtain today, needless to say). Scouting for locations in Switzerland led him to Schaffhausen, on the Rhine river, which was a source of hydroelectric power for the watch industry as early as the 1850s, when Heinrich Moser built a hydroelectric plant near the famous Rhine Falls.
The development of a town centered around manufacturing and shipping at the Rhine Falls, or Rheinfall (auf Deutsch) was a natural one, partly thanks to readily available water power, and partly due to the fact that the falls were an obstacle to navigation. The Rhine Falls are the largest falls in Europe, at nearly 500 feet wide and 75 feet high and peak waterflow is 8,800 cubic feet per second, on average, in the wintertime when the flow is greatest. Since passing the falls by boat is not only impossible, but suicidal, shipments traveling down the Rhine were unloaded above the falls and portaged to points below, where they could be reloaded onto ships for the remaining journey – to Basel, or perhaps through Germany or even to the Netherlands, where the Rhine eventually reaches the North Sea.
In an interesting twist of fate, Jones’ first shot at making IWC a success ran into considerable obstacles, and Jones was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1875. The company passed to the control of the Rauschenbach family in 1880 – Johann Rauschenbach-Vogel was the company’s CEO and bought it, lock, stock, and barrel, for CHF 280,000 – and his two daughters inherited the firm, with their husbands becoming managing directors. One of the daughters was Emma Rauschenbach, and her husband was none other than the renowned psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, whose theory of archetypes continue to influence the practice of analysis today (at least, inasmuch as classic psychoanalysis per se is still practiced today, which is maybe not as much as Jung, Freud, Adler, and their contemporaries might have hoped).
Florentine Ariosto Jones’s company set out to make watches on the American model both in terms of manufacturing, and in terms of quality, which is to say they were intended to be reliable, durable, precise, and relatively inexpensive. Pocket watches were of course the order of the day, with the advent of wristwatches as ubiquitous personal timekeepers still many decades off, and the first movement F.A. Jones designed was the so-called Jones caliber. The Jones caliber was made from about 1872 to 1876, and according to Michael Friedberg, the world renowned IWC collector who ran IWC’s Collector’s Forum from 2001 to 2016, there were about 26,000 made (no records survive, but Friedberg has written that he feels that this is a reasonable estimate). Friedberg has written extensively about the history of the Jones caliber, which was a robust, 3/4 plate design, with a distinctive, very long regulator sweep.
The Jones caliber was revived by IWC in 2005 as an homage to the founder, and the 2005 version of the Jones caliber was something quite special – a version of IWC’s famous 98 series pocket watch calibers, in this case designated 98290. The caliber 98290 was released as a limited edition in the Portuguese (now Portugieser) collection, as the Portuguese F.A. Jones Limited Edition, with 1000 in steel cases, 1000 in rose gold, and 500 in platinum; the model you see here is one of the steel series.
In 2005 IWC had only recently launched its Big Pilot Watch, with the Big Pilot automatic ref. 5002 having debuted at Baselworld just three years before. The whole notion of “a pocket watch for the wrist” was central to IWC’s campaigns and product development strategy, and the Portuguese collection, which had according to IWC gotten started when two IWC clients from Portugal had, in the 1930s, asked for wristwatches with the accuracy of pocket watches, was central to IWC’s efforts. This was also during a period when larger watches were very strongly preferred by the market, and Jones limited edition at 43mm was squarely in the then-sweet spot for mechanical watches.
The Jones limited edition was designed to emulate 19th century pocket watches both in terms of the movement, and the overall design of the dial, although the case had contemporary design features like relatively short lugs, which allowed the watch to be worn more easily on smaller wrists. Since the Jones caliber is an adaptation of a pocket watch movement originally designed in 1936, the seconds hand is, as was the case in virtually all pocket watch movements, mounted directly on the pivot of the movement fourth wheel, which rotates once per minute, and which is located at 6:00. In order to make the running seconds hand as legible as possible, the seconds subdial is made as large as possible, and cuts into the location of the numeral 6 (again, a design feature virtually ubiquitous in pocket watches). In fact, the overall dial design is consistent with the design of American railroad grade pocket watches, which were made for the rail service as the name implies, and which generally used Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals for better legibility.
The real star of the show, however, is the Jones caliber 98290. The pocket watch origins of the movement are obvious, in many respects. The caliber 98290 is a whopping 37.80mm in diameter, and unlike many larger diameter movements made today, the balance is in proportion to the rest of the movement overall. The movement has a 46 hour power reserve and beats at a stately 18,000 vph, which was the standard for precision pocket watch movements through the late 18th and 19th, as well as much of the 20th centuries. The 3/4 plate is nickel silver, sometimes called German silver or maillechort, which was historically used in high grade pocket watch movements for its resistance to corrosion. The decoration of the movement is also in line with the origins of the first Jones calibers – it is a form of so-called damaskeening, which is a kind of engine turning that was widely used in the manufacture of American pocket watches. The term is a bit confusing, as “damascening” usually means decorative patterns made by inlaying one metal into another; the variant spelling is one I’ve only seen used in the context of American pocket watches.
The balance has two meantime weights on the balance arms, and the balance spring is a hand-formed Breguet overcoil. The most distinctive feature of the regulating system, however, is the very long regulator sweep, which is used to make minute adjustments to the position of the regulator pins on the outermost coil of the balance spring. Such long regulator sweeps are seldom if ever used today, as they would not be practical in wristwatch movements, but they were frequently used in 3/4 and full plate precision pocket watches, especially in the United States, as the length of the sweep makes it easier to make very small changes in the position of the pins themselves.
The ref. 5442 is a remarkable piece of IWC history on a couple of counts. First of all, of course, is the movement – IWC no longer has a time-only hand wound Jones caliber watch in any of its collections, and this is one of the last examples of IWC producing a caliber 98-family time only movement (there are no longer any such watches in any of IWC’s collections; the only hand wound Portugiesers left are tourbillons) so such a movement represents a time in IWC’s history when its rediscovery of its own heritage, which had begun post-quartz crisis back in the 1980s, was still fresh in the company’s collective memory. And secondly, of course, there is the direct connection to the legacy of Florentine Ariosto Jones, whose first attempt might have stumbled at the starting line, but which would go on to become one of Switzerland’s most widely respected makers of precise and practical timepieces. While the idea of a “pocket watch for the wrist” would probably seem unrealistic today, in 2005, this example was a proud statement from IWC, of its time-tested leadership in both the pocket watch and wristwatch worlds.
For pricing and availability, please contact The 1916 Company, and view our collection of pre-owned IWC watches here.