Cartier and the shaped watch

A watch made in 1904 so an aviator could keep his hands on the controls, and one in 1917 drawn from the tracks of a tank. A century of a house insisting that a watch need not be round.

Alberto Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian living in Paris and one of the first people in Europe to fly a powered aeroplane. He complained to his friend Louis Cartier that timing a flight with a pocket watch meant taking a hand off the controls at exactly the moment he could least afford to. In 1904 Cartier made him a flat, square-ish watch with a leather strap and exposed screws on the bezel, and put it on his wrist.

That is the Santos, and it matters for two reasons. It is among the earliest wristwatches made for a man at a time when wristwatches were considered women's jewellery, and it was made for a specific practical purpose by a jeweller rather than a watchmaker. Cartier put it on sale to the public in 1911.

The Tank came in 1917, and the story is that Louis Cartier drew it after seeing the new Renault light tanks on the Western Front: the two vertical bars either side of the dial — Cartier calls them brancards — are the tracks seen from above, and the case between them is the body. Whether the derivation is quite that neat, the shape has not needed altering in a hundred and eight years.

What followed was a century of variations that are all recognisably the same idea. The Cintrée of 1921, long and curved to the wrist. The Américaine, taller still. The Française, softer and squarer. The Must de Cartier of the seventies, in silver gilt with a quartz movement, made when the house needed volume and now the entry point for most people's first Cartier. The Crash of 1967, which looks like a Baignoire that has been through something, and about whose origin nobody entirely agrees. The Panthère of 1983, which is as much bracelet as watch.

Underneath all of it is a position that the rest of the industry spent the twentieth century disagreeing with. A round case is easier to seal, easier to machine, and holds a round movement without wasted space. Cartier accepted every one of those disadvantages because it was a jeweller first, and a jeweller draws a shape and then finds a way to fit the mechanism into it. That is the opposite of how watches are usually made.

It also explains why Cartier movements were, for most of the century, bought in rather than built. The house was not competing on calibres. It was competing on the proposition that a watch is an object worn on the body, and that its outline is the first thing anybody sees and the last thing they forget.

The market has come round. Shaped watches are the fastest-moving segment of the trade at present, after two decades in which the answer to every question was a round steel sports watch on an integrated bracelet. A Tank Louis Cartier in yellow gold on a leather strap is the least sporty watch imaginable and currently among the hardest to find at a sensible price.

If you are looking, the advice is the same as it is for any Cartier: buy the shape you actually like on your own wrist rather than the reference somebody has told you is rising. There are a dozen Tanks and they wear entirely differently, and the only way to know which is yours is to put them on.