A Watch Found on the Titanic Just Sold for Nearly $1.5 Million

On April 15, 1912, John Jacob Astor IV, one of the world’s wealthiest men, helped his young, pregnant wife, Madeleine, into lifeboat No. 4 on the deck of the Titanic. Having asked whether he could board with her, he was told that only women and children were allowed. Astor is said to have calmly kissed his wife, handed her his gloves, and retreated to the deck to smoke a cigarette with American journalist and mystery writer Jaqcues Futrelle.

The ship sank at 2:20 a.m.

When Astor’s body was recovered, it was accompanied by the trappings of an elite American life: gold-and-diamond cufflinks, a diamond ring, today’s equivalent of several hundred-thousand dollars and pounds in currency, a gold pencil, a pocketbook, and a gold pocket watch with a white dial, black Arabic indices, and sub-seconds. The watch was left to Astor’s son Vincent, who had it restored and wore it for several decades; he in turn later gave it to the son of William Dobbyn IV, his father’s executive secretary, as a christening gift. Made of 14-karat gold and featuring Astor’s initials engraved onto the outer case, it was produced by Waltham—a firm that made nearly 40 million timepieces in Massachusetts between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th.

This week the Waltham came under the hammer at Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes, England, where it was accompanied by a signed affidavit from the Astor family attesting to its provenance. Hammering for 1.175 million pounds, or nearly $1.5 million, it is now the most expensive piece of ephemera ever sold at auction from the R.M.S. Titanic, eclipsing even the violin owned by English violinist and bandleader Wallace Hartley that was auctioned by the same firm in 2013 for roughly $1.4 million. An American collector is said to have been the watch’s buyer.

The Waltham, unlike complicated pocket watches commissioned by the likes of super-collectors such as Henry Graves Jr. and James Ward Packard, isn’t particularly special by strictly horological or ornamental terms. But its prominent owner, recovery from the world’s most famous ship to ever sail, and remarkable survival throughout the generations has imbued it with a unique status. (Indeed, what was notable about American watchmaking was precisely its assembly-line, vaguely anonymous character—this, after all, was the mass-production methodology that could have put the Swiss out of business. Astor’s Waltham was one such mass-produced watch.)

Which goes to show that it’s not necessarily the watch that counts, but the story behind it that most often captures the imagination of both collectors and laypeople. Such was certainly the case here with this admittedly pedestrian, American-made pocket watch, worn by one of the world’s most prominent men as he went down with the world’s most famous ship.

Originally Appeared on GQ