The handy little watch
Revue Thommen Airspeed Automatic
There was a time when Chinese food in America - real Chinese food - was not well-known. One of the people who changed that was Joyce Chen. She said she was on the second-to-last ship out of Shanghai when the communists took over, settled in Cambridge Massachusetts, taught cooking at the Center for Adult Education, filmed a few public tv episodes on Julia Childs’ set, and quickly became a local celebrity.
She had a restaurant (Henry Kissinger ate there!), a line of packaged food products, and a Joyce Chen store in Acton, Massachusetts, near my house. Walking through it one day I saw Ms. Chen’s “Handy Little Knife”, a cheap Japanese red-sheathed wonder that she swore by. In the cutthroat 1980s cooking market, with its Italian knife blocks, and prestige German boning knives with ultra high-carbon steel blades, Joyce Chen said she got most of her work done with a little knife too cheap to put on the shelf at Sears.
Alas, it was too good to live. Like so many other things Japanese of the 1980s, the Handy Little Knife has gone by the wayside. You can still find a ‘Handy Little Knife’ on Amazon, but the Japanese product has been replaced by a Chinese version that keeps the price point, but offers none of the gratuitous excess quality of the original.
Japanese version no longer available - this inferior version $6.99 on Amazon, linked below
I think everyone has something like this in their home: a pen perhaps, or a pocket knife, that gives faithful service year after year. Fancier, more expensive products may come and go, but these modest, useful things stick around, always seemingly ready-to-hand.
So it is with my Revue Thommen Airspeed Automatic, a watch I picked up in a swap with a friend back in the 90s. Two decades later, I still wear it once or twice a week.
Like Joyce Chen’s Handy Little Knife, the secret is gratuitous quality. When this watch was made, Revue Thommen was an aircraft instrument manufacturer with a nice little side business in watches. It’s not like that anymore: the parent company decided to get out of the watchmaking business shortly after this watch was made, licensing the name to another firm. It didn’t go well, and the brand all but disappeared. A re-launch under new management in 2015 has helped restore a bit of respectability, but this piece, sadly, is among the last of a special breed.
The instrument heritage is obvious from the face: the hands have the familiar white-on-black aesthetic, and the same generously-applied lume (now yellowing noticeably) as an analog altimeter. Instead of a date window there is a discrete pointer directing you to the appropriate numeral on the inner bezel. It is a model of economy and efficiency, but without slipping into overt spartanism. The crystal has an anti-reflective coating so good that one sometimes has the sense that there is no glass at all:
It is powered by the ETA 2836-2, a workhorse Swiss movement found in many luxury watches, including the Fortis Flieger and Sinn 104.
The 36mm case is small by modern standards, but that’s one reason the watch is so handy. Once it’s on you barely notice it.
My only regret is that as my eyes deteriorate it’s a little harder to appreciate the detailing on the dial, and reading the date can be a chore. But adding a date window with magnifier would spoil the Airspeed’s clean design, I think. It is a watch that quietly, efficiently, unobtrusively, reminds you of the beauty of a certain kind of mid-century analog design, in a world that seems in a rush to forget that such things ever existed.
