Quote:
Originally Posted by Deaf Stan
Fair enough. I guess I'm just a little disappointed with some of the engagement here, it feels a but defensive (or maybe it's just me that does?)
Anyway, thanks for the article. I have a lot of respect and affection for Smiths and this has only increased it! Any company who made clocks for Spitfires can claim some serious attitude -- AND altitude!
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Ahh, but here's the rub: Smiths have nothing to be proud of there.
Back in the Thirties, there was a very good chronometer clock designed for aircraft. It was called the chronoflight and, initially, it was designed by Jaeger and made by LeCoultre (before the two became one). Unfortunately, in the thirties. protectionism was rife and to get around this, LeCoultre opened shadow factories in the UK, US and USSR to make this very clock and other instrumentation.
Within two years, the Soviets had nationalised the Russian one, which carried on churning out Russian Chronoflights until 1993 - the are easy to get on ebay but very radioactive. The American outfit carried on happily for years, but in the UK, Joseph Smith, acting like a gangster, engineered a situation in which Lecoultre had little choice but to sell a controlling interest in the factory and allow Smiths to rip off their deign which they merrily did via a proxy, a distant relative of Jaeger, for a short while before absorbing it into Smiths.
Meanwhile, The chronoflight was only used in the earliest of Spitfires. Before a handful of squadrons had been equipped, the Spifire was equipped with an entirely inferior design, mostly made by smiths but topped up by US imports. By the middle of the Battle of Britain, there were a handful of Chronoflight equipped Spitfires. By 1942, the clock position was usually blanked over as it was realised that the Spitfire really didn't need one in the role it was used for.
Ironically, a thousand war weary Spitfires were given to the USSR with the clocks stripped out - the Russians gleefully retrofitted them with their own identical clocks. As a result, it is probably more likely that a Spitfire (or Hurricane) was fitted with a Russian variant than the original which was probably only fitted to a handful of pre-production models.
And IWC was owned by CG JUng who I argue was culpable for the death Of James Joyce!
They are all rotters. The lot of them! ;-)