With vintage watches, small details matter a lot. In fact, they’re basically everything. When it comes to assessing the originality of a dial, this goes double, since any re-dial or service dial will dramatically impact the overall value of a watch. This explains the multiple questions surrounding the weird, round little marks sometimes found surrounding the “Swiss” or “Swiss Made” on watch dials from the 1970s. Those little marks are actually the lower case Greek letter sigma, and the dials are aptly called “sigma dials.” The issue, you see, is that most of the plentiful information you find out there about sigma dials is wrong, plain and simple. So I decided to dig deeper and figure out when those sigma dials truly appeared and why. The story turned out to be even more interesting than I had expected.
Continue reading ‘Historical Perspectives: What Exactly Is A Sigma Dial? (And Why Does It Matter?)’