Arnex 17 Jewels Incabloc Swiss Made Pocket Watch

Arnex 17 Jewels Incabloc Swiss Made Pocket Watch (with chain)

Arnex is a brand originating in the Swiss Jura, the heart of the Swiss watch-making industry, from a community called Arnex-sur-Orbe. The original company was acquired by Lucien Piccard (The LP Watch Group). The brand is associated with good quality but affordable time pieces.

Incabloc is a shock-protection system introduced in 1934, so this pocket watch is no older than that. The system was widely used from the late 1940s and early 1950s and was trademarked in 1957. I suspect it was manufactured some time after that and no later than the early 1970s when the Swiss watch industry went into a period of decline and when Arnex probably folded as an independent company. With that being said, I would date it as being from the 1960s.

17 jewels makes it a "fully-jeweled" time piece, i.e. an appropriate number of jewels for a reliable mechanical watch. The jewels are there to provide hard surfaces for friction points inside the watch mechanism to improve reliability, they do not provide a cosmetic purpose. The jewels would be synthetic in any watch made in the period in question.

It is probably not of great value perhaps 50 dollars just from what i learned so far.