There’s rare, and then there’s rare.
Also, there’s what you know and what you don’t, and what AI knows and what it doesn’t; and at the end of this equation is gold.
Or at least sand-blasted stainless steel.
To explain…
The company Edouard Heuer founded in 1860 and which bore his surname became a watch-making legend, synonymous in the 20th Century with motor racing in a way no other brand could ever really match. That was because Heuer led the world in timing devices and stopwatches used by racers; it was a natural evolution for those same drivers to start strapping a chronograph to their wrists which bore the same name as the ones on their dashboard.
By the time this reached its zenith (no pun intended) in the 1970s, the company was being run by Edouard Heuer’s great grandson Jack. Born in 1932, Jack had known nothing but Swiss watchmaking, but despite his lineage he was a natural innovator and constantly pushed Heuer in to new places (not least space, when US astronaut John Glenn took a Heuer stopwatch on his mission).
Yet the ’70s were more a time of pain for Heuer than pleasure, despite their uber-cool pit lane credentials, thanks to the quartz crisis which hammered them as hard as many other Swiss makers.
They branched out from chronos to add dive watches to their catalogue, and they were superb. The company gradually stabilised and grew again through the early 1980s but the economic damage had been serious and Heuer remained financially weak. Which was when Luxembourg-based Techniques d’Avant Garde (TAG), a corporation with fingers in pies as varied as business aviation, real estate and motorsport, decided to make an offer. Thus, in 1984, Heuer became TAG Heuer, the brand we know today.
But just a few months before the papers on this deal were signed, Jack Heuer (who remains Honorary Chairman of TAG Heuer to this day) had taken one of his regular flights of pioneering fancy and decided to reinvent the dive watch as proper, hardcore tool for divers, rather than a trinket for advertising executives.
So in early 1984 the striking Heuer Super Professional, reference 840.006, was born.
The watch was a 1000 meter capable diver hewn from a mono-bloc case – one single piece of metal. Its unidirectional bezel was turned with tags big enough to be operated underwater whilst wearing thick gloves of the kind sub-surface welders used. And any semblance of shiny was avoided by having the entire thing, case (43mm including the crown, they’re not actually that large) and bracelet, sand-blasted.
It was basically bullet-proof. You could bang in tent pegs with it. There’s an argument that it’s the tooliest tool watch ever made.
It was also, at the time, alarmingly different to everything else.
Remember that in 1984 the typical man’s watch was quite slim, as likely to be square as round, and all about under-the-cuff style. Or they were digital, which was the “in” thing back then. What they were’t were rock sold tool watches you could drop from an aircraft to destroy a building. It caused a storm on release and was as hated as it was loved, but became in time one of the watches professional divers actually bought and used in large numbers. Whatever else it was, it was authentic.
It was also very expensive, as all mechanical Heuers had become as Jack Heuer moved them up to the top of the market from the late 70s and onwards, chasing big profit per piece not big sales numbers.
Then in mid ’84 TAG hoved in to view, and into the boardroom, and every watch the company made from that point on bore the TAG Heuer branding on its dial (with the exception of some quite recent 21st Century retro releases); and that included the Super Pro, which would remain in production for some years selling well for a purpose-focussed watch.
What that meant though was that a very small number of Super Pros with “Heuer-only” dials, as collectors call it them, had been sold in early ’84, before the TAG deal was signed and the dial change happened. Today they’re very rare, as they would be given both the small number which ever existed, and the passage of time + attrition (although given the nature of a Super Pro more survive of the original run than could be said of most watches – come the apocalypse it will just be these things and the digital clocks from 1980s Toyotas which remain).
Heuer watches always command much higher prices than their TAG brethren, even when, as in the case of 840.006, they’re exactly the same watch. The power of the lone Heuer brand was always stronger, and as it’s become more and more retro cool in the last 20 years that premium has only increased.
So the great news for collectors is that because few people outside those deep in to the Heuer brand know this, there’s one of the rarest Heuers you can buy out there, and they’re not only one of the great true tool watches but they’re not silly expensive (because it is Heuer chronos which command the silly money). Of course the TAG version is just as good, and a lot less money, but Heuer is Heuer and, as we came in, rare is rare.
