Wakmann Venus 178 Chronograph

Case: Three-body, screw-down case back, stainless steel. Chronograph pushers at 2 and 4 o’clock. Signed.

Dial: Silvered dial with applied baton and Arabic numeral indices. Subsidiary seconds at 9 o’clock. Hours, minutes, and chronograph. Signed.

Movement: Manual wound, Venus 178, 17 jewels.

Diameter: 37mm, thickness: 12.7mm

Crystal: Plexiglass.

Condition: Good condition, with some signs of wear.

More about Wakmann:

The Wakmann Watch Company was a distributor of luxury watches based in New York starting in 1946.  In addition to their distribution business (importing and selling Swiss-made watches to the American market), Wakmann also operated its own technical workshops to develop their own watches and clocks.

When the The Swiss Watch Import Act began to tax the import of finished watches and finished watch movements, Wakmann leveraged their workshops to assemble unfinished watches and unfinished movements imported from Switzerland while avoiding additional duties.

During this same time, Wakmann expanded production of its own watches and timepieces.  In the 1950s and 1960s, Wakmann made several successful chronograph models, the most famous of which is the present example.