A while ago, I wrote about how the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce (SOGC) can be used as a movement identifier for the period from 1900 to 1946. There I described that registered designs and models were also published in the SOGC from 1889, including movements.
Unfortunately, pictures of the registered movements were not published until August 1900. Until then, they were only deposited with the Swiss Federal Office of Intellectual Property in Bern.
Thanks to a very nice member called VinSer from the PocketWatch-Forum, I got a hint about a document that was published by the Swiss Federal Office of Intellectual Property, probably in 1901. It contains the pictures of the registered movements from June 1, 1889 to July 31, 1900 and is probably the oldest movement identifier in the world! VinSer, thank you very much once again!
And the best thing is that this work is freely accessible in digital form at the Swiss National Library and can even be downloaded as a PDF:
https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/search?urn=nbdig-840969
The document has 275 pages and shows around 700 movements.
The first registered movement has the registration number 13, comes from Courvoisier frères and bears the inscription TIC-TAC:
Unfortunately, I don’t know whether this movement was ever made like that.
In the first part on the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce as a movement identifier, I showed two movements from before 1900 that I identified from the registration numbers on the movement, but for which I could not show any pictures of the registration. I can do that now:
Pierre Petignat 320 / Model No. 1
You can see that there are sometimes small differences between the registered movement and the one actually built.
Braunschweig & Hirsch 610 / Model No. 1
And here is another movement that I was only able to identify via the document presented here:
Schild Frères model no. 137
Occasionally, the registrations in the SOGC also elicit a smile, for example in this movement, whose bridges represent a face:
If any of my readers were also able to identify one or the other movement with the help of the document presented here, I would be delighted to hear about it!