10 May 2007, 11:27
I did some additional tweeking of the image of the caseback of this watch and discovered the serial number is actually 521, not 571. The lowest known number is 223, the highest 640. There are seven watches with serials above 521. So it's up there, but far from the highest. The closest other serial is 512. Would have been cool if it had turned out to be consecutive with another P1, but, no such luck. There has been a lot of speculation in the past as to how a run of 400 watches spans a serial number range of almost 420. The numbers make no sense in any traditional context, either in where they start, or stop, although the "P" prefix makes at least some possible sense. There may have been numbers within the original range that were never used, but we will never know for certain which ones those were, since the great majority of the P1s will never be accounted for, most likely having been destroyed in the gold frenzy of 1980, when the price of gold hit US$850 per ounce [I am no longer going to debate this; I have already talked to one jeweler who distinctly remembers scrapping at least one Limited Edition, and I have no doubt this went on all over the country]. At that price, the potential profit [that is, beyond the original purchase price of $2100] in scrapping a P1 was nearly $1100 [a lot of money back then, especially for a watch that was already considered obsolete and unrepairable [and it has been my experience that "sentiment" doesn't hold up well under the pressure of such financial gain]. Indeed, it is quite possible that more than a few WORKING P1s went into the melting pot. In any event, I rejoice in the discovery of another example of this historically significant timepiece.
