21 Dec 2009, 05:23
Good thing this one fell into the hands of someone who cared...but, the awful truth is...not all gold Pulsars are so lucky. There's a bit of a discussion going on on 'the other" forum about the "melting pot theory", specifically concerning the P1. They made 400; less than 50 are accounted for in all collections. And the other 80+% of them...where are they? If you consider that, in 1980, these watches had ZERO collectors' value, the lure of making a quick $1500 or so on a watch [which jewellers would not even bother to put a new battery in, and were generally considered obsolete], would be nearly irresistable. The original owners have mostly died off, the safe-deposit boxes have been opened. The last P1 I bought escaped destruction only because it still worked, but it had been purchased [from an estate] for scrap. I shudder to think how much irreplacable antique silver went into the crucibles during the Bunker-Hunt fiasco [about the same time as gold peaked, when silver hit $50 an ounce]. Yet, the cry continues that "they will all eventually be found"...at the current rate of discovery, that should only take another three centuries or so. Another example, there was no such thing as an 18K Executive five years ago, then I found 13 of them in a lot of watches that had been stored in Israel for over 20 years. To date, AFAIK, these remain the only existing specimens, not one single new example has surfaced anywhere in the world...where are the others? Believe it or not, like it or not, we are in the midst of another "mass melting"...I recall a TV ad saying "sell us your old, broken, unwanted gold, silver...etc", exhorting people to actively search for anything that would have precious-metal value...and they were looking to spend $300M in the next three months! I'm not suggesting that Pulsars are being singled out here...I guarantee you, plenty of Rolexes, Pateks, Omegas, Bulovas and others are disappearing, too. But, the Pulsars are a special case, historically speaking. We lost a lot of them 29 years ago, and we are certainly losing more now. If you assembled all the Pulsar collections in the world, I think you'd be pressed to come up with a thousand in solid gold, and that would be 70% or more in 14K, and there are models of which no examples are known [in the 18K Midas models], and many others you could count on your fingers [and not need your toes]. Didn't mean to ramble here...just did me some good to see an important piece rescued from oblivion...
Last edited by
bruce wegmann on 06 Jun 2011, 04:23, edited 1 time in total.
over.
