September 2024
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.
Watch-ing Rainbows
The Strange Journey of John Lennon’s Stolen Patek Philippe Watch
A gift from Ono, the watch is more than anyone would ever need to tell the time. A perpetual-calendar chronograph, it is, as Paul Boutros, the head of watches at the American arm of Phillips auction house, says, a “mechanical microcomputer, the most sought after of all Pateks.” Between 1952 and around 1985, Patek produced just three hundred and forty-nine of them. The watch, which Ono bought at Tiffany on Fifth Avenue, records time in eight different ways; the dial houses three apertures (day, month, moon phase) and three subdials (seconds, elapsed minutes, date). If you never memorized the mnemonic “thirty days hath September,” no worries—the 2499 Patek hath. Its miraculous ganglia of tiny wheels and levers will adjust its readings to the quirky imperfections of the Gregorian calendar, including leap years. No other watchmaker was able to produce a perpetual-calendar-chronograph movement small enough to fit into a wristwatch until 1985.
What makes this 2499 even rarer—and perhaps the most valuable wristwatch in existence—is how little we know about it. Ono gave it to her husband for his fortieth birthday, on October 9, 1980, two months before he was fatally shot by a deranged man outside the Dakota. For the next three decades, the existence of the watch remained unknown except to a handful of family and close friends.
Olympic Village
- How Omega Captured The Men’s 100m Final Photo Finish (And The Watch Noah Lyles Wore While Winning)
- No, You Can’t Beat an Olympic Table Tennis Player
- Six Olympic athletes described the delicate mechanics behind their chosen event
- Hector Vivas’s composite images from the Olympics
Links
- The Murky World Of Counterfeit Rolex
- Dark Patterns Hall of Shame
- Art But Make it Sports
- Brain cell looking for a connection
- 29,000 Feet Up Mount Everest with a Drone
- Mystery Search
- Blockbuster Video VHS insert template
- Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
- The Insane Engineering of the Game Boy
- The “crappy” math behind the Calories
- James Mollison’s series of music fans outside concerts
- Shutterbug
- Reverse Engineering TicketMaster’s Rotating Barcodes
Sign Off
Do not hesitate to reply to this month’s email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.
Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.