This model is particularly rare and collectible for a number of reasons. Little did I know at the time, the watch was a seldom-seen Nivada Grenchen Chronomaster Aviator Sea Diver (CASD) “Special Logo” reference 0/4076. You can find the whole story and all the detail about these Chronomasters in our book, which is presented here.One of my first forays into vintage chronographs was a purchase early in my watch collection. At the same time (and this is a common phenomenon when stories of this type, long forgotten, are revealed again), the price of the rarest vintage models has increased considerably.
Many articles were then devoted to Chronomasters, and we received many inquiries about these models. The success of the book was immediate, and beyond all personal satisfaction, we were delighted to make (re) discover this extraordinary model to a new public of collectors with whom it had previously gone unnoticed. A real “Swiss knife” of watchmaking therefore, and this from 1961, the year of its creation.īut very quickly, after retracing the beginnings of history, it was the immense variety of dials, hands configurations, bezels and calibers that definitively decided us to publish an “ONLY” book dedicated to this chronograph. It was therefore a completely versatile sports watch, the objective of which was to meet all the requirements of the public at the time. Then the very name of the model challenged us: Chronomaster (Chronograph for the very first series) Aviator Sea Diver. This special model was Nivada Grenchen’s Chronomaster, and when we started our research, we couldn’t imagine the great adventure we were embarking on (together with our Italian friend Matteo aka we had to reconstruct and understand an incredible story that started in the city of Grenchen in Switzerland, and which then developed in the United States thanks to an American distributor, giving rise to multiple names not always simple : Nivada, Nivada Grenchen, Croton Nivada Grenchen, Croton, Croton 1878 …
This choice was dictated by a very simple reason: we were really passionate about a chronograph from the very beginning of the 60s, more or less forgotten, but endowed with an absolutely fantastic look and incredibly representative of this glorious era during which the foundations of today’s sports watchmaking were created. About 3 years ago, we decided to write for the first time a book from the “ONLY” series which was not dedicated to an OMEGA model.
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