Cross & Beguelin Swiss Centennial Pocket Watch (1890)

About this Cross & Beguelin

In 1890, as Nellie Bly stepped off a steamer in New York having circled the globe in seventy-two days and Benjamin Harrison signed Yosemite into a national park, a Swiss-made movement crossed the Atlantic bound for 21 Maiden Lane, the beating heart of New York's watch trade. There, in the shop of Cross and Beguelin, it was fitted into a nickel silver case stamped with a Maltese cross and the twin dates 1776 and 1876, and sold under the house name they had chosen to honor the American Centennial. A hundred and thirty-six years later, here it is.

Closed, the case gives nothing away. A plain polished nickel silver body with crisply stepped bands, the Maltese cross of Cross and Beguelin struck into the metal alongside the Centennial legend, and no hint of what is underneath. Then the back opens on its hinge and there is a glazed cuvette, a glass inner dust cover fitted so the movement could be shown off without ever being opened to the air. Open it and the movement is on full display behind glass; close it and the whole works are sealed against dust and lint.

Inside beats a classic Swiss bar movement, built on a broad gilt barrel bridge set against grained nickel plates, a two-tone finish that took extra hours at the bench. The jewels sit in polished gold settings, the screws are heat-blued throughout, and a cut bimetallic compensation balance swings beneath, the sort of balance that let a watch keep its rate across changes of temperature. It left its maker unsigned, as these private-label movements did, so that the only name on the finished watch would be the one Cross and Beguelin had paid to put there.

The small button on the band beside the pendant is how you set the hands. This is pin-setting, the older arrangement from before the crown took over both jobs: you wind from the crown, but to move the hands you press and hold the pin with a fingernail while turning it. The hands cannot move unless you intend them to, which is exactly why the arrangement existed. It’s a beautifully tactile reminder of how time was kept before the turn of the century.

Cross and Beguelin were importers rather than makers, a partnership founded in 1863 between Alfred Cross of Maine and Henry Beguelin, a watchmaker from Le Locle, and from their shop on Maiden Lane they sold private-label Swiss movements under the Centennial name. The grade of what they brought in varied with what they bought, so the glazed cuvette and the gold jewel settings together place this piece at the better end of their catalog. The Maltese cross trademark was registered in April 1884 and the Centennial name was retired by the mid 1890s, which puts this watch inside a window of about ten years, right in the middle of it.

The hands are worth a long look. The hour is a tapered spade, the minute is pierced with an open scroll that curls back on itself before running out to a fine point, and a slender counterpoised hand with a blued hub sweeps the seconds dial below. They are the work of somebody who did not have to make them beautiful and did it anyway, and they sit over a white enamel dial that is clean and bright throughout, Roman numerals bold against it, the outer Arabic five-minute chapter crisp, finishing with a classic sunk seconds dial at six.

The whole watch is excellent throughout, and the movement runs strong behind its glass cuvette. This is a rare and beautiful window into the transatlantic watch trade of the Gilded Age, and the sort of piece a thoughtful collector carries, winds, and hands on.

All Vintage Pocket Watches are cleaned, oiled and adjusted for accuracy and warranted for one full year from the date of purchase.