The Cartier Santos

I love researching and checking out prestige timepieces, a huge name in the fashion industry is Cartier and I am amazed that they generally rate third behind Rolex and Omega in premium watch sales. This surprised me so I began to look into the Cartier watch range and although the Santos has been discontinued at time, the Santos model is constantly revived.

I was wandering around one of those huge shopping malls they have in the Philippines when I decided to wander in the Cartier shop within the anchor department store. Along with Cartier, there was a Bvlgari, Swarovski and Tiffany & Co store with the Cartier store opening into the main mall as well as the department store.

The Santos follows the traditional Cartier formula with an elegant square watch design. The design dates back to 1904 when Louis Cartier design a wrist mounted timepiece for Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos Dumont.

So, amazingly the Santos is not only the first watch designed exclusively to be worn on the wrist but the Santos is an aviator's timepiece. With Cartier's market positioning as a high end luxury retailer, it's hard to believe the industrial design origins of the original Santos.

Back around that time watch manufacturers were taking established movements from pocket watches and placing the movement in a wrist mounted case. The move from pocket watches to wrist watches has military origins as military planners needed to synchronise infantry and cavalry charges to artillery bombardments.

You don't want to move too soon nor do you want to leave the charge too late and the defensive positions have the chance to move back to their machine gun posts and cut you down.

The pioneering days of flight had requirements where two hands were required on the controls, it probably wasn't a great technique to fumble around pulling your pocket watch out, flipping the case open and glancing at the time.

Back in those days, flight was a fairly hazardous activity considering the Wright brothers made their first flight in December 1903. Flipping the auto-pilot on back then wasn't an option.

Dumont graduated from balloon flight to fixed winged aircraft that has been described as lighter-than-air to heavier-than-air flight. Some arguments exist that Dumont predated the Wright brothers in self-propelled fixed wing aircraft flight. What is not denied is that Dumont was a pioneer of flight and was a well known aviator of his time.

The now iconic design with curved horns formed from the case, Roman numerals on the dial, blued Cartier hands and exposed bezel screws. The case is water resistant to 10 bar or 100 metres depth but I really couldn't see anyone going diving with this on their wrist.

The current movement is automatic on the models I checked although quartz movements also exist with this model. The Calibre 1847 is an in-house movement with 23 jewels operating at 4Hz frequency and a 42 hour power reserve.

Would I ever see myself purchasing a Cartier Santos? Well, the answer is no. However, I do like to head out and research, try on and review iconic timepieces.

The Cartier Santos certainly has the heritage to be worthy of the respect of the watch community. For me, one of the advantages of heading out to the retail store is I am able to collect the books the major manufacturers produce and assist my research.