Benrus Calendar - Early 1950s - Patented Pointer Date and Day Window - Sculpted Lugs - Cream Dial

On Jan 1st 1952, the United States Patent Office granted patent number 2,581,268 to Adamir Marchand a watchmaker in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He had filed it in Switzerland nearly five years earlier, in March of 1947, for a small and clever idea: a way to set the date on a calendar watch by pushing the winding crown straight in, against enough resistance that you would never trip it by accident. The patent was assigned to the Benrus Watch Company of New York, and its number is stamped into the back of this watch, which dates the watch itself to 1952 or just after.

Benrus called it, plainly, the Calendar, and it was the most complicated thing the company ever built and the one it sold the most of. Around the edge of the dial runs a ring of numbers from one to thirty-one. A black hand with a red arrowhead points to one of them, and over a month it works its way once around, a day at a time. The day of the week shows through a small window in the upper dial, and the seconds run in a sunken sub-dial at six. To move the date you press the crown, the way Marchand drew it. It is a lot to ask of a dial this small, and the cleverness is that none of it crowds. Collectors have never really let these go, and the pointer is the reason.

Benrus was a New York company, founded in 1921 by three brothers, Benjamin, Oscar, and Ralph Lazrus, Romanian immigrants who put up five thousand dollars between them and started out of the Hippodrome building in Manhattan. Like most American names of the day they did not make their own movements but bought them from Switzerland, where the family kept a factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and cased them in America for buyers who wanted a good watch at a fair price. The Benrus name would later go onto the watches the company built for the United States military, from the Second World War through Vietnam, but its most inventive civilian work, this calendar among it, came first.

The case is round, ten karat rolled gold plate over a stainless steel back, with fancy sculpted lugs that curl down to the strap and date the watch as plainly as anything on the dial. The back reads Waterproof, Dustproof, Calendar, and carries that second patent, 2,302,340, Ernest Morf's 1942 waterproof case, the kind of sealed construction a mid-century watch used to promise it could stand up to daily life. The gold shows the honest wear of seventy years, with scratches and some thinning where a wrist rides hardest.

The dial has gone a warm cream with age, unevenly, in the way an original dial does and a refinished one never can. The even hours carry applied gold numerals, the odd ones faceted gold lozenges, and the hour and minute hands are gold dauphine. There is spotting scattered across the surface, the plain record of a watch that was worn and kept rather than shut in a drawer, and on a watch like this an original dial is worth more than a clean repaint.

Inside is the Benrus caliber CE 13, seventeen jewels, unadjusted, a Swiss manual wind movement, with the day and date work laid out on the dial side beneath the hands.

The watch is on a tan leather strap with contrast stitching, a recent addition and not original to it.

The watch is running and keeping time.

Terms: Please review all photos carefully as they are a part of the listing. This is a vintage timepiece. Accuracy, power reserve, and water resistance are not guaranteed. Vintage watches may require periodic service. Performance can vary with wear, temperature, and position.

I am happy to service any unserviced watch listed on the site, please inquire about service charges when purchasing.

All sales final.