What does the number 49229 mean to you ?
To me it means the origin of the species !

This is a very big reveal for me. I have long been a fan of the very earliest 3 register, 2446 screw back Autavia's. The Valjoux.72 is universally accepted as a great quality movement & to my eyes offers up a nicely balanced tri-compax dial configuration. The combination of the earliest Autavia's larger register dials and dauphine hands has always looked just right but they are so rare and illusive i thought i would never find one. My observation is they tend to be traded behind the scenes with private emails rather than in the eyes of the public in an auction format.

Then without warning one of my grail watches turned up, even rarer than the lume insert dauphine Autavia's are the very first full lume dauphine hand examples.

Here we see the OTD registry page for the earliest known examples of the screw back Autavia's
http://www.onthedash.com/docs/AutaviaRegistry.html
You can see that the 4 known examples of the full lume hand 2446's from the registry have a very narrow serial range, 49169 - 49283. My watch lands inside this narrow range at 49229 confirming it as one of the original batch.

As with most of these watches you can see they have been used over the years as the case and bezel show their fair share of bumps and scratches. The dial has luckily aged a little more gracefully, closer inspection shows the circular grooves of the oversized white registers are still present in both texture and colour.
This watch comes with quite some history too. The watch was originally purchased in 1962 by an Austrian woman celebrating becoming the first female pilot for Austrian Airlines.
She used the watch throughout her career there and up until a point in the 1980's where she retired. The watch was then put away and used rarerly until she died and the Autavia went to her nephew. The new owner never wore the watch, not knowing its signifance in the collectors world he then sold it back the the watch shop that his aunt had purchased the watch from originally & serviced it throughout its life. Its from here http://www.uhrmacher.at/werkstatt.html i purchased the watch, the second time the same shop had sold the watch in 60 years.

I feel very lucky to have found such a lovely rare watch and know so much of its history. Special thanks go out to James who replaced the crystal & custom made one of his quality DB10 straps to match it.

Cheers - Darren