Original vintage 1960s print advertisement for the Eterna Matic Kon-Tiki automatic watch - "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." 
 
Dimensions: Roughly 10 inches wide by 13.50 inches high.
 
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.
 
The particular model in this advert here was named after the Kon-Tiki expedition, a 1947 journey by boat across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The boat was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca god Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name.
 
Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have reached Polynesia during pre-Columbian times, Heyerdahl and five companions sailed 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.
 
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.
 
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.