Movado: One Idea, Held for Eighty Years

Movado was founded by Achille Ditesheim at nineteen, with six employees. The name was adopted in 1905 and is Esperanto for always in motion, which tells you something about the era's optimism.

For its first fifty years Movado was a technically serious Swiss house. The Polyplan of 1912 used a curved movement built to follow the shape of the wrist, which almost nobody had attempted. The Ermeto of 1926 was a travel watch that wound itself as its case was opened and closed.

Then in 1947 a designer named Nathan George Horwitt proposed something that had nothing to do with mechanics.

Horwitt's idea was that a dial should be stripped of everything unnecessary. No numerals. No markers. A single gold dot at twelve, representing the sun at noon, and two hands to track it. It was Bauhaus thinking applied to a watch face.

It was so far outside convention that Movado did not commit to it immediately. When it did, the Museum Watch became one of the most recognised dial designs ever made, and in 1960 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it for its permanent collection. That is where the name comes from.

Why it matters here

Almost nothing else in watchmaking achieves that much recognition with that little on the dial. A Movado reads as considered rather than expensive, which is a difficult and useful thing for a watch to do.

The piece to know: any Museum dial. The design has barely changed since 1947, which is the point.