Second Hand Stories RSS

Second Hand Stories is where the watches on our shelves meet the history behind them: the makers, the movements, the rivalries between Switzerland and America, and the small details that rarely make it into the catalogs. Each story is researched across sources in several languages, so you read what the archives say, not only what the internet repeats.

What sets this blog apart is the experience of seeing it. Every illustration is an AI-generated image created individually from real references and in-depth research, so you can step into the workshops, offices and streets where these watches were born.

Stories from the world of vintage watches: the makers, the movements and the history that shaped them, researched in depth and in several languages.

Our realistic illustrations are AI-generated images made individually from real references and in-depth research, an experience rarely found on other watch blogs.

06, Oct 2026

Hidden in Rabbit Skins: The Trade War That Put Three Letters on Swiss Watches

Smoot-Hawley, rabbit skins and light bulbs full of Swiss watches. Turn over a vintage Swiss movement and you'll find three tiny letters with a smuggling war behind them.

02, Oct 2026

A Brief History of the Railroad Watch, and the Four Minutes That Created It

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a railway disaster, and in the spring of 1891, that silence settled over a stretch of single track near Kipton, Ohio. Two trains of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway had been running toward each other on the same line — not through recklessness, but through the quiet, almost invisible failure of a single pocket watch. The engineer of the Toledo Express believed he had time. His watch told him so. What it did not tell him was that it had quietly lost four minutes somewhere over the preceding days — an error too small to notice, and large enough to kill. When his train failed to yield the track,...