Original vintage 1959 Eterna advert for the Swiss watch company's KonTiki dive watch, "When a Man's Life Depends on His Watch."
Dimensions: 10.25 inches wide by 13.50 inches high
"Nothing fazes Kon Tiki! Guaranteed reliable, year after year. This rugged timepiece has endured the most rigorous tests in the laboratory and on research expeditions. It has maximum safety-reserve at its disposal even under the toughest sport and daily use condition."
In 1958, the KonTiki watch collection was released. The watch was inspired by 1947 Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition, which featured a journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca god Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name.
Heyerdahl's book on the expedition was entitled The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas. A 1950 documentary film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and a subsequent 2012 dramatized feature film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores.
The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6,900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.
The original Kon-Tiki raft is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo.
Eterna Watch Company
Eterna is another vintage watch brand that remains significantly undervalued and largely unknown. Regardless, the level of intrinsic quality, with a high level of finish and engineering, found on the best period Eterna movements from the golden age of Swiss watches is high.
But Eterna has been around since 1856, so there's a lot of history to consider. But although on a parallel with Rolex and Omega, Eterna can thankfully - due to its relative anonymity - be acquired for comparatively relatively modest sums of money. While largely overlooked by the general public in favor of products by the better-known watch manufacturers, Eterna of this era possess a high level of finish and engineering.
In late 1856, Dr. Joseph Girard and Urs Schild, a 28-year-old school teacher, founded Eterna – however, its products were ahead of their time, as wristwatches didn’t become fashionable until the early 1900s, but by this time Eterna had started to produce women’s wristwatches, adapted from small pocket watches.
In the 1900s, wristwatches were just starting to become fashionable. Schild Fréres, as the company was then known, started to produce ladies’ wristwatches adapted from small pocket watches. In 1905, the company changed its name to Eterna. The company continued to be at the leading edge of watch development, and in 1908 it patented the first alarm wristwatch. The watch went into production in 1914 and was launched at the Swiss National Exhibition in Bern that year.
Eterna continued to be at the leading edge of watch development, and in 1908, it patented the world’s first alarm wristwatch, which went into production in 1914. Eterna innovation didn’t stop here: the 1930s were an incredibly productive decade – it came out with the smallest production wristwatch with a Baguette movement, an eight-day alarm watch, and their first automatic watch.
In 1948, Eterna advanced self-winding watch technology with the development of the Eterna-matic automatic movement. The use of five strategically placed ball bearings made the movement very efficient and significantly reduced friction and resistance on the oscillating weight that wound the mainspring. This reduced the wear and tear on internal parts, increasing the watch’s accuracy and useful life.
The new watch became popular, and is probably the most famous Eterna watch and may be one of Eterna’s greatest designs – in fact, its popularity was such that in 1948 Eterna adopted the image of five balls as its corporate logo.
