Closed | Important watches – Saturday 15 November 2014

In the year 1888 the two brothers Adolf and Alfred Kurth founded their company “Kurth Frères”, which made watch parts in Grenchen, Switzerland. The company would later on begin to make watches under the name Grana and eventually develop to become the brand we know today as Certina. The name Certina comes from the Latin “certus” which means assured and was chosen to underline the watches reliability. To really emphasise this, the DS line was made in 1959. DS stands for Double Security and on those watches the movement is suspended in a reinforced case.

Certinas most well known and successful chronograph line ever is probably the Chronolympic which came in the late 1960’s. About a decade later, it was one of those watches that showed exactly how durable Certinas’ craftsmanship is. It was in 1970 when Certina sponsored a Japanese Mount Everest expedition and all five climbers wore a DS-2 Chronolympic. After finally reaching the top, one of the participants, Yuichiro Miura, decided to be the first man ever to ski down the mountain. After about two minutes, in which he travelled about 2000 metres and is estimated to have reached a speed up to 160 km/h, he lost control and was seriously injured. The watch however was still fine, despite the crash and the trip’s fast changes in altitude and temperature.