IWC Ingenieur

What does a manufacture get when it combines all of its military, scientific, and engineering knowledge into one watch? The IWC Ingenieur Reference 666AD. But the Ingenieur's story really begins with the IWC Mark XI. As a navigator’s wristwatch, the Mark XI had to stand up to the magnetic interference posed by instruments in an airplane’s cockpit. Albert Pellaton, IWC’s master calibrist, achieved this by surrounding the movement in a soft iron cage.The Ingenieur took the information gleaned from making the Mark XI, which was purpose-built according to stringent standards set by the British Ministry of Defense, and used it to produce a high-grade civilian timekeeper.  While the Ingenieur was to be less martial in spirit, it had to be no less anti-magnetic, or robust, due to the type of person whom IWC meant to wear it. We mean scientists and engineers, whose work put them in close contact with equipment that emitted high levels of magnetism. On July 19, 1945, the Manhattan Project culminated in the detonation of a nuclear weapon, which ushered the world into the Atomic Age. Even after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the power of the atom was harnessed for more peaceful pursuits. The same men who had constructed the first atom bomb set to the task of erecting nuclear power plants across the United States, and cooling towers soon became a familiar sight in the post-war landscape. For those scientists, IWC created the Ingenieur. The movement that Pellaton constructed for it, the Calibre 852, coupled the anti-magnetic resilience of the Calibre 89 with the innovative winding system Pellaton devised for the manufacture’s automatic watches. Further improvements resulted in the creation of the Calibre 8531 found in this watch, a Reference 666AD. Originally offered with or without a date, the 666 proves to be one of the hardest vintage IWC’s to find on the market today. A combination of limited production and unassuming looks, not to mention the perils of time, make early examples such as this one quite desirable indeed. With a crisp case and a silver pie-pan dial — not to mention the charming date window, placed on the inside of the pie-pan bevel — this Ingy comes complete with an IWC-signed beads of rice bracelet, perfectly encapsulating the aesthetics of the Atomic Age.