A jeweller that treated the wristwatch as a design problem rather than an engineering one — and got there first.
Louis-François Cartier took over his master's workshop in Paris in 1847. It was his grandson Louis who turned the house towards watches, and who understood something the Swiss did not: that the shape of a watch is the watch.
In 1904 he made one for his friend Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian aviator, who complained that a pocket watch was useless when both hands were on the controls. The Santos is commonly called the first purpose-built men's wristwatch; it went on sale to the public in 1911. The Tank followed in 1917, its case sides said to have been drawn from a Renault FT tank seen from above, and reached customers in 1919 — six of them.
The Crash was made in Cartier's London workshop in 1967, a Tank that appears to have melted, and remains one of the few watches whose appeal has nothing to do with what is inside it. Cartier's contribution to watchmaking is not a complication. It is the idea that a watch can be a shape you recognise across a room.
Chrono Chong Inc. is an independent watch dealer. We are not an authorized dealer for, and are not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Omega, Tudor or any other manufacturer. All brand names, model names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only to describe and discuss the watches we sell. These pages are historical background written by us; they are not published or approved by any manufacturer. Watches bought from an independent dealer are not covered by the manufacturer’s factory warranty. Read the full disclaimer.
