Nearly a century after the AVIGO name first appeared, one surprisingly simple question remains difficult to answer:

How many original AVIGO wristwatches were actually produced?

We have been digging through surviving Elgin records, vintage advertisements, catalogs, movement databases and documented surviving watches looking for the answer.

What we’ve discovered is an intriguing story — but also a historical mystery that has yet to be completely solved.

WHAT WE KNOW

AVIGO emerged from the Elgin National Watch Company at the dawn of a remarkable period in aviation.

Period documentation places AVIGO around 1929, although evidence surrounding its introduction extends back toward late 1928. Contemporary advertising establishes that Elgin was actively marketing the AVIGO as an aviation watch by 1929.

One period advertisement described it as the:

“Elgin Avigo, Air Corps specification aviation dial.”

The watch was advertised for $23 — a substantial purchase at the time.

AVIGO was also more than the name of a wristwatch.

Elgin used the AVIGO name in connection with aviation instruments, reinforcing that the identity was deliberately tied to the rapidly developing world of flight.

AVIGO WAS A LINE, NOT A SINGLE WATCH

One of the most important discoveries from our research is that there wasn’t simply one AVIGO.

Multiple AVIGO references and configurations appear in surviving records and examples.

Among the references identified during our research are:

426
428
461
475
675
E-302

There may be others.

Different examples also appear with different cases and movement grades.

That discovery makes determining total AVIGO production considerably more difficult.

WHY WE CAN’T SIMPLY COUNT THE MOVEMENTS

Elgin kept remarkably detailed movement-production records, and many of those records survive today.

Unfortunately, they don’t directly answer our question.

For example, movements such as Elgin Grades 485 and 487 appear in AVIGO watches. Elgin manufactured very large numbers of these movements.

But those movements weren’t manufactured exclusively for AVIGO.

They were used across numerous Elgin watches.

Therefore, saying that Elgin produced hundreds of thousands of a particular movement and assuming those were AVIGO watches would produce a wildly misleading number.

The number we’re looking for isn’t:

How many compatible Elgin movements were manufactured?

It’s:

How many of those movements ultimately became AVIGO wristwatches?

That’s a much harder question.

THE SERIAL NUMBERS PROVIDE ANOTHER CLUE

Documented surviving AVIGO watches have been identified with movement serial numbers including:

32,683,725
32,847,354
33,177,317

The separation between these numbers is significant.

It suggests AVIGO wasn’t produced as one enormous consecutive production run.

Instead, the evidence points toward AVIGO watches being assembled at different times, using different movement production runs and appearing in multiple case configurations.

That fits what we’re seeing in catalogs and surviving examples.

SO HOW MANY WERE ACTUALLY MADE?

At this point, no reliable publicly available source we have located provides a definitive total.

However, the evidence allows us to begin forming a hypothesis.

Based on the number of known configurations, the period during which AVIGO appears, the movement runs involved and the relative scarcity of surviving examples today, our current working theory is that AVIGO production was likely measured in the thousands rather than hundreds of thousands.

A reasonable preliminary hypothesis would place total production somewhere in the low thousands to perhaps low tens of thousands.

But that distinction is important:

This is an estimate — not a documented historical production figure.

We have found no evidence supporting claims that hundreds of thousands of AVIGO wristwatches were manufactured.

At the same time, we have not yet found sufficient primary documentation to claim that only 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 or any other specific number existed.

Until we have factory documentation, assigning an exact figure would be speculation.

THE ANSWER MAY STILL EXIST

Fortunately, our search isn’t over.

The Elgin History Museum in Elgin, Illinois maintains an extraordinary collection of material relating to the Elgin National Watch Company.

Its research holdings include historical company documents and production information, including records concerning watches manufactured before the 1950s.

Not everything in those archives has been digitized.

That makes the museum particularly important to this investigation.

We are contacting the museum and asking researchers to look specifically for AVIGO production information from approximately 1928 through the mid-1930s.

Rather than simply requesting movement-production numbers, we’re looking for something much more specific:

Factory production ledgers.
Case-order records.
Material lists.
Model records.
Manufacturing orders.
AVIGO-specific production quantities.

Ideally, surviving documentation could tell us how many examples of each AVIGO reference were manufactured.

If individual model quantities survive, it may even be possible to reconstruct the total original AVIGO production ourselves.

A 97-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY

There is something fitting about the fact that the answer isn’t immediately available online.

AVIGO comes from an era when America’s watch industry was enormous, aviation was transforming the world, and companies such as Elgin manufactured watches on a scale almost unimaginable today.

Records were kept on paper.

Companies disappeared.

Factories closed.

Documents moved into archives.

Watches were lost, damaged, discarded or forgotten in drawers for generations.

Yet some survived.

And so did many of Elgin’s records.

For now, the most accurate answer to the question “How many AVIGO watches were originally produced?” is:

We don’t know yet.

Our research suggests the number may have been relatively small compared with Elgin’s enormous overall watch production, and our working hypothesis currently places AVIGO production somewhere from the low thousands into the low tens of thousands.

But we’re looking for something better than an estimate.

We’re looking for the original records.

We have reached out to the Elgin History Museum in hopes that somewhere among the surviving documents of the Elgin National Watch Company is a ledger, production record or case order that finally provides the answer.

If it exists, we intend to find it.

And when we do, we’ll update this history with what the records actually say.