Eternamatic 1000

The story of five ball bearings

Eterna is a Swiss luxury watch company founded in Grenchen, Canton Solothurn on the 7th of November 1856 by Dr. Josef Girard and Urs Schild. By 1932, Eterna had set up a subsidiary company, ETA, to make movements for itself and other Swiss watch companies.

Eterna produced many innovations in their history. In 1948, the Eterna-matic automatic movement was developed. The use of five strategically placed ball bearings made the movement very efficient and significantly reduced friction and resistance on the oscillating weight that wound the mainspring. This reduced the wear and tear on internal parts, increasing the watch’s accuracy and increasing its life span. This is probably the most famous Eterna watch and might be one of Eterna's greatest designs. It became so popular that Eterna adopted the image of five ball bearings as its corporate logo.

After 1982, Eterna was sold several times. Currently, Eterna belongs to International Volant Ltd, a subsidiary of China Haidian. 

Here I have a gold plated Eterna-matic 1000 which starts production from 1969. Its case's diameter is 34mm excluding crown. The crown is gold plated with the 5 ball bearings logo. 

This is an automatic watch with quickset date function. The date is set by repeated pulling the crown. 

There is a hidden mark on the center of the acrylic glass. Yes, there are 5 points in the centre of the glass.

Pretty standard screw in stainless steel caseback with not much information. 

Here we have the Eterna in-house 1489K movement. This calibre 1489 K based at ETA 2433 made to Eterna specification, The Eterna movement are quite well polished compares to standard ETA. 

This Eterna-Matic Brevete movement has 21 Rubis with a frequency of 21,600 A/h and a power reserve of 47 hours. What is worth note-taking is that this movement employ the Patented Kif-Ultraflex antishock, that is used by Jaeger LeCoultre mechanisms.