The 36000 BPH Watch Collectors Site

Overview

Longines was the second watch maker to introduce high frequency movement watches to the market. Longines sometimes labeled models with these movements "Ultra Chron" and sometimes they didn't. To further confuse things, a second generation of the high frequency movement, ended up being a 28,800 vph movement with some watches still being called Ultra Chrons.

A number of different movements were produced beginning in 1967 through 1975. The 430 movement with seconds, the 431 movement with date and seconds, and the 432 and 433 without seconds. Manual movements produced featured an unique hacking feature. When the crown is pulled, the watch runs until the second hand reaches 12 at which point it stops. Manual wind movements were the 6952 which featured date and the 6972 which featured day and date.

While "Ultra Chron" may seem synonymous with 36kbph movements in Longines watches this isn't entirely true. Longines also produced watches with the 6651 and 6652 movements and labeled these watches "Ultra Chron", but the movements beat at 28800 BPH. These two movements were architecturally similar to the 430 series movements, and thus Longines referred to them as Ultra Chron's. These movements were often used in the Admiral Diver's model of this period.

"Ultra Chron" branding was also used by Rado on some of their watches in mid to late 70s, but it does not appear that these watches had 36KBPH movements, or were in any way related to Longines.

Admiral

A long standing traditionally designed model, the Admiral was sold in Ultra Chron and regular versions. These watches have a date feature and were mostly made in automatic wind versions based on the 430 and 431 movements. In the absence of Ultra Chron labeling, there is no way other than to find the movement number to tell whether an Admiral has a high frequency movement or not. As far as unlabeled watches go, 5 Star Admiral versions seem to be more likely than regular Admirals to have the 36000 bph movement in them.

1972 Munich Olympics Commemorative Models

For the XX Olympics in Munich, Longines produced a limited number of manual wind "Admiral" watches based on the 6952 movement and marked "HF" for high frequency on the dial, along with a one button non-36kbph movement Conquest chronograph.

Olympian

Following the XX Olympics, Longines introduced the Olympian line of watches. These traditionally designed watches featured Day/Date and were available as automatic and manual wind versions. Some of these watches are marked "HF" on the face and most likely have 36,000 VPH movements.