Watch quiz Ref. NQ0006 answers, Sept 28, 2026 | NO QUARTZ

Question 1

In watch jargon, what is a 'complication'?

Accepted Answer

Any function beyond showing hours, minutes and seconds — A date window counts, and so do chronographs, GMT hands and moonphases. By convention the tourbillon and even self-winding are also called complications, although they add nothing you can read on the dial.

Question 2

In 1949 Panerai registered 'Luminor' as the name of a new self-luminous substance, replacing its earlier Radiomir. What was Luminor based on?

Accepted Answer

Tritium — Radiomir, from 1916, was a radium-based powder; Luminor swapped radium for tritium, a hydrogen isotope with much lower radioactivity. The name began as a lume, not a watch, which is why 'Radiomir' and 'Luminor' now label case families rather than paints.

Question 3

The Breitling Navitimer was launched in 1952 as the official watch of which organisation?

Accepted Answer

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) — The Navitimer's circular slide rule was not new in 1952: Breitling had launched its slide-rule bezel a decade earlier on the Chronomat. What the Navitimer added was a customer with a membership list, the AOPA, whose members got a navigation computer on the wrist.

Question 4

The earliest known lever escapement survives in a watch by Thomas Mudge, now in the Royal Collection. Whose watch was it?

Accepted Answer

Queen Charlotte — George III acquired it in 1770, and Mudge called it 'the Queen's watch' and 'the most perfect watch that can be worn in the pocket, that was ever made'. The Royal Collection judges his lever, with the exception of the balance spring, the greatest single improvement ever applied to watches.

Question 5

Rank these watch houses by founding year, earliest first.

Accepted Answer

1. Breguet (Paris) 2. LeCoultre (Le Sentier) 3. Heuer (Saint-Imier) 4. Hamilton (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) — Antoine LeCoultre's first workshop grew out of his invention of a machine to cut watch pinions, not out of finished watches. Edouard Heuer was only 20 when he opened his shop on the family farm at Saint-Imier, making mostly silver pocket watches.

Question 6

From 1969 until 1999, the Henry Graves Supercomplication belonged to which collection?

Accepted Answer

Seth Atwood's Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois — Industrialist Seth Atwood bought the watch from Graves' heir in 1969 and put it in his Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois. When the museum closed, Sotheby's sold it in New York on 2 December 1999 for US$11,002,500, a record for any horological object. The anonymous buyer was later revealed in a lawsuit over unpaid Sotheby's bills to be Qatar's Sheikh Saud Al-Thani. He died in London in November 2014, just days before the watch's Geneva sale, where it more than doubled its 1999 price at CHF 23.2 million (about US$24 million).

NO QUARTZ Ref. NQ0006: the answers