PANERAI, LIMITED EDITION WHITE GOLD RADIOMIR WITH INDEPENDENT CENTRE SECONDS, NO. 139/160, REF. OP 6551

The present Panerai Radiomir Independent is number 139 of the limited edition produced in 2001. It is preserved in excellent overall condition and sold with the original guarantee and box.

Available exclusively in white gold and made in a unique edition of 160 examples only, the model has one of the rarest technical functions found in a wristwatch: jumping seconds, also known as dead beat or “seconde morte”. The mechanism, the forerunner of the chronograph, dates back to 1776 when Geneva's Jean-Moïse Pouzait presented a paper describing the principle of a watch with independent seconds. A separate gear-train allowed the seconds hand to be stopped and started at will, independently of the mechanism that drove the hour and minute hands.

In the 1950s, the jumping seconds experienced a revival, presumably for use in laboratories or by doctors, as following the process of the dead beat second hand is much easier compared to the classic central second. The function is achieved by a special mechanism which causes the second hand to stop at each second mark before jumping to the next one, performing exactly like the hands of an analogue quartz watch, instead of continuously sweeping as normally found in a hand-wound watch.

The cal. 7400 movement used for the Panerai Radiomir Independent dates from the 1950s and was supplied by Chézard, the at the time best known manufacturer of movements with jumping seconds, named after the location of the company.