NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
The Price of Mechanical Marine Chronometers and Deckwatches
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2012 Jan 19, 06:47 +0000
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2012 Jan 19, 06:47 +0000
I have been trawling the Internet recently and looking at what is available in the way of marine chronometers and deck watches. The one thing that struck me was that the prices of these clocks are much the same now as they were 25 years ago when I bought my Ulysses Nardin marine chronometer. The chronometer was made in 1920 and had probably spent most its life in an admiral's desk draw, but in 1987 it cost me $2200 and if I was to sell it today, the going price would be much the same. I contacted a dealer whose speciality is marine chronometers and deck watches, and asked him if he thought prices had remained static over the last 25 years. He agreed that for 'ordinary' chronometers that are not especially old or have historic connections, that was the case. But given an average inflation rate of, say, 3%, the value of the dollar has halved over the past 25 years and so in real terms, the price of chronometers and deck watches has also halved since I bought mine. They are obviously not a good investment. But will they continue to decline in value? In the entire history of chronometer manufacture, there were probably only 100,000 or so made. A sizable slice of those are probably at the bottom of an ocean somewhere and apart from a small continued production in Russia, nobody is making them any more and all the guys who know how to keep them going are pensioners. Now, in the depths of a depression, the price of a piece of navigation history of this sort will probably never get lower in real terms. So, if anybody has a hankering to own a real, live, ticking chronometer, now is probably the best time to buy one. And no, I don't want to sell mine and I don't deal in chronometers or deck watches. As I say, it is not a good business to be in right now, not for sellers anyway ;-) Geoffrey Kolbe