Jean d’Eve Sectora

The Sector Watch

In June 1903, the Turin inventor Giovanni Sgherlino filed an American patent for a clock or watch whose two hands travelled across an arc before returning suddenly to their starting positions.

The surviving patent drawings show a mechanism constructed around toothed sectors, specially shaped wheels and return springs. The minute hand travels to 60 and flies back to zero. The hour hand does the same after reaching 12. The patent was granted in the United States in May 1905, following Swiss patent No. 27,961.

Record Watch Co. was organized in Tramelan in 1903 around putting Sgherlino’s invention into production. The resulting Sector Watch was unlike an ordinary pocket watch in almost every respect.

Its silver case was shaped like a fan or section of a circle. The white enamel dial followed the same outline, with hours running from 0 to 12 and minutes from 0 to 60. The movement was shaped to fit the case rather than placed inside a conventional round shell.

Many cases were supplied by Holy Frères of Saint-Imier. Surviving examples have floral Art Nouveau ornament, niello decoration and elaborate relief scenes depicting dancers, hunters, horses and romantic figures. Behind the decorated cover is a hinged silver cuvette, usually engraved “Sector Watch.”

The watch is occasionally described in dealer and auction copy as a jump hour. That terminology is misleading. A true jump-hour watch presents the hour as a numeral on a moving disc. The Record has an hour hand. What jumps is the hand’s return to zero, making it a double-retrograde display rather than a digital jump hour.

An April 1996 article in Horological Times included photographs of one example and a response from the watchmaker Henry B. Fried. Fried wrote that he had repaired numerous Sector watches and warned of the damage caused by watchmakers unfamiliar with the under-dial mechanism.

Auction appearances confirm that several case variations survive. A decorated example sold at Antiquorum for CHF 5,250 in 2012; Heritage sold another for $3,500 in 2016; and Auktionen Dr. Crott sold an example with a runaway-horse scene for €5,500 in 2022.

Jean d’Eve Brings It Back Again

Le Phare and Sultana combined during the 1970s. Jean d’Eve emerged as the group’s modern, quartz-focused identity during the following decade.

By 1986, the Sectora had returned under the Jean d’Eve name. The company’s own fair material presented it as a successful display from the beginning of the twentieth century, now revived with quartz technology. Jean d’Eve was not pretending it had invented the arrangement. It was selling the return of an old idea.

The movement architecture had changed, but the basic performance remained familiar. A quartz oscillator regulated the watch while gears, cams and springs converted its rotation into the motion of the retrograde hands.

The case was entirely new. Its upper half follows the arc of the dial, while the lower section closes around the hands’ central axis like a stylized shell. Instead of hanging from a pocket-watch bow, it flows directly into an articulated bracelet.

The range expanded quickly. In 1987 Jean d’Eve showed a smaller women’s Sectora alongside the men’s model. Contemporary material records gold-plated, solid 18-karat-gold and diamond-set cases, with a calendar offered on the men’s version. Sectoras remained in the fair record in 1989.