Lot 474

Angelus Watch & Co.

Chronodato

A highly attractive vintage wrist chronograph with full calendar and tachy scale

This attractive classic vintage piece comes with long, gently curved lugs and a narrow bezel. The charmingly aged creamy-coloured dial has two registers for the auxiliary seconds and the 45-minute counter, luminous Arabic numerals and beautiful, blued hands filled with luminous material. The month appears in French in a small window at "12", the day of the week opposite at "6" o'clock. The diaI also features an outer blue tachymeter scale to take measurements of speed and distance.

Angelus was founded by the brothers Stolz in 1891 in Le Locle. They produced interesting timepieces right from the beginning and the quality of the company’s pocket watch and repeater movements was officially recognised with an award at a Swiss national exhibition in 1914. The Stolz brothers also soon started producing wristwatches, particularly chronographs. Even today the name Angelus is mainly associated with these stopwatches. The company designed their own calibres to develop the complications for their watches, such as the Chronodato, which was the first chronograph with calendar function in mass production worldwide.
In the late 1970s the company became a victim of the quartz crisis. Today it is only the large "Angelus" lettering on the old company building in Le Locle that recalls this maker of fine chronographs.