SJX Watches
Complicated Collectors: Seth Atwood
In the late 1970s, anyone serious about horology would eventually find themselves in Rockford, Illinois, about 90 miles west of Chicago. Visitors stayed in a hotel near a motorway that happened to be home to many of the world’s greatest clocks and watches. The collection of Seth Atwood sat below the everyday hum: Roman sundials beside Islamic astrolabes; marine chronometers alongside French regulators; English pocket watches paired with American factory movements; and, at the far end, atomic clocks. Rockford was a town that built machine tools and industrial equipment, so the hotel naturally served business travellers and convention attendees. But among them were watchmakers who flew in from Europe and Asia to see mechanisms they couldn’t examine anywhere else. For nearly three decades, one man’s vision put Rockford on the horological map. The 1972 secular true perpetual calendar Patek Philippe ref. 871, made for Seth G. Atwood. Image – Christies/collage Rockford native Seth Glanville Atwood was born in 1917, into a world of industrial logic. His father had started the Atwood Vacuum Machine Company a year earlier, its first product a simple spring-loaded bumper that kept car doors from rattling. Detroit needed millions of them, and the company grew from there, supplying window regulators, door hardware, and other practical parts in volume. Seth grew up around engineers and production managers who solved problems with their hands. After Stanford, Harvard Business Sc...
