OMEGA 1621 ALASKA IV
On the trail of a space-spec timepiece with a remarkable trajectory – to the Moon and back
YOU HAVE MORE chance of winning Britain’s Got Talent by singing Monteverdi madrigals than you have of bagging an unknown ’63 Ferrari GTO from a private seller who doesn’t realise what they have. Top-flight cars are too well known, too storied and have too wide an appeal to stay hidden. Watches, on the other hand, don’t feature on teenage walls or Top Trumps cards. You could have walked past one of the rarest watches in a charity shop window en route to buy this magazine and not even realised.
It doesn’t help that the only apparent difference between an interesting watch and a singular, history-making piece can be as tiny as a missing few letters on an otherwise identical dial. This is the realm of the obsessional.
One of the TZ-UK forum regulars was trawling an auction site when he saw a listing for an ‘Omega 1621’. To someone who’s spent far too long in the depths of 1970s Omega quartz archives, that’s enough to set alarm bells ringing. Most people know what an Omega Speedmaster looks like. Fewer know that from 1977 there was a short series of quartz digital Speedmasters, powered by the cal.1620 quartz movement, accurate to five seconds a month. Only nailed-on watch-heads know that in 1978 Omega made 20 prototypes with a modified movement – the cal.1621 – and sent 12 of them to NASA for Space Shuttle flight trials. These were called the Alaska IV watches after Omega’s Alaska Project – its designation for timepieces designed to be test flown in space with NASA. And some of them got lost.
The differences between the already-rare 1620 and the 1621 Alaska IV are tiny: a slightly thicker case with fatter pushers and a digital display illuminated with minute tritium tubes rather than a conventional bulb (NASA was concerned about bulbs blowing in space). As a consequence, the Alaska IV’s face doesn’t carry the word ‘LIGHT’. There was no need for a button-activated light as the tritium tubes glowed constantly.
Our man checked the listing pictures; no ‘LIGHT’. This looked good. But if he’d spotted the 1621, surely others would have, too? He says: ‘The week of the listing was very long. I kept checking to see if anyone had bid. Each day, the tension rose. Still no one had spotted it... Half an hour before auction’s end, I had three bids lined up. I fired in the first with 15 seconds to go, then panicked – what if someone has a snipe in? I fired in my highest bid, with 10 seconds to go – but it wasn’t needed. The watch hadn’t been spotted.’
After a weekend on tenterhooks, the watch arrived. Our hero first checked the ‘light’ pusher. Nothing. Dead as space. Which was perfect – a working light would’ve meant the Alaska IV module with the ‘Beta’ tritium tubes had been replaced. A dead light button was a good sign indeed.
The next stop, after consultation with a TZ-UK Omega expert, was Swiss Time Services, an independent Omega repairer and vintage specialist. Watchmaker Simon Freese, now working independently, took the first official look. And he liked what he saw. The inside caseback was engraved 1621, just as it should have been. The circuit of the movement was missing the tiny light bulb that would illuminate the liquid crystal display (LCD), just as it should have been. Even better, the outside caseback bore a number ‘1’; this looked like the first of the Alaska IV test series watches.
Simon then checked for the key tritium tubes behind the LCD. Sure enough, under ultraviolet light, he could see two rectangles glowing. This was the real thing. Not just a NASA Speedmaster, but the first of the series.
After getting the watch verified by Omega itself, our hero handed it to Sotheby’s to feature in its Omega Speedmaster – To The Moon And Back auction on 19 July. This piece of NASA and horological history made just $12,500. Not a bad return from a brave online auction punt, but surprisingly cheap for the first of a space-prototype series. Someone got quite a bargain.
‘TO SOMEONE WHO’S SPENT FAR TOO LONG IN THE DEPTHS OF 1970s OMEGA QUARTZ ARCHIVES, THAT’S ENOUGH TO SET ALARM BELLS RINGING’