Long before the Royal Oak, Audemars Piguet’s reputation was built on two fronts: grand complications and extreme thinness. As early as 1938, its caliber 9ML, 1.64 mm thick, was the thinnest wristwatch movement in the world – yet it remained a rarity: the manufacture acquired only a little over seven hundred ébauches of it in fifteen years. This was then a manufacture of artisans which, in the early 1950s, sold fewer than a thousand watches a year.
It was in this context that the caliber 2003 was born, in 1953. Its ébauche was developed in Le Sentier, at LeCoultre & Cie, under the direction of Maurice Audemars, and reserved for a handful of houses: Audemars Piguet had first claim to it, Vacheron Constantin would adopt it only in 1955, for its bicentenary, under the name caliber 1003 – and Jaeger-LeCoultre, which had nonetheless designed it, would never house it in a watch bearing its own name. With a diameter of 20.8 mm and a thickness of 1.64 mm – less than a one-euro-cent coin – it equalled the thinness record of the 9ML it succeeded, while gaining in robustness: 17 jewels, 18,000 vibrations per hour, and an architecture of such purity that the manufacture would derive from it, some fifteen years later and with the assistance of LeCoultre, its celebrated extra-thin automatic caliber 2120 – the very one which, in its date version, would power the first Royal Oak. Success was immediate: by 1958, nearly three quarters of Audemars Piguet watches were fitted with it, and it would remain in the catalogue until 2003 – half a century of production and more than 60,000 examples. Where the 9ML had remained a laboratory feat, the 2003 turned extra-thin watchmaking into genuine series production.
The reference 5043, launched the same year and produced until 1972, is the watch designed around it – and, for nearly twenty years, one of the house’s best-selling models. Its 32 mm round case in 18K yellow gold is constructed in three parts: a mirror-polished bezel, a satin-finished caseband and bevelled lugs whose facets catch the light. The snap-on caseback is decorated with perlage on the inside and stamped with the Geneva Key No. 23, the master’s mark of Eggly & Cie – one of the great Geneva case makers, which also worked for Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe. The whole measures less than five millimetres thick, crystal included. The silver-ivory dial, signed Audemars Piguet Genève, keeps to the essentials: printed baton hour markers, doubled at 12 o’clock, and tapered gilt baton hands. A flat crown, a domed Plexiglas crystal: nothing protrudes, and that is precisely the point. The dress watch par excellence.
Our example, produced circa 1955, is numbered 51xx (case) and 60xxx (movement). To put the latter in perspective: in eighty years of existence, the manufacture had by then produced only around thirty thousand movements. The 5043s that reach us today have most often suffered from their very thinness: repolished cases with rounded lugs, refinished dials, replaced hands or crowns. None of that here. The watch has never been polished: the facets of the lugs are crisp, the line between the polished bezel and the satin-finished caseband is sharp, and the hallmarks – Helvetia head on the lug as well as inside the caseback, “18K 0,750” fineness mark, Geneva Key No. 23 – are remarkably clear, of the kind that a single polish is enough to erase. The original silver-ivory dial is in very beautiful condition.
The caliber 2003 has been fully serviced by one of our experienced watchmakers and runs perfectly. Adjusted to temperature and in four positions, as the engraving on the movement indicates, it bears witness to the care the manufacture then devoted to each of its mechanisms – a 1.64 mm caliber is not produced on an assembly line. We present this watch on a new extra-thin black alligator leather strap, handmade by our artisan without visible stitching so as to respect the slimness of the case, and complemented by a yellow-gold-plated pin buckle. It comes with our Steel Warranty Card.
An Audemars Piguet from the 1950s preserved in a condition one virtually never encounters any more, powered by the caliber that carried the manufacture for half a century: in our eyes, the dress watch par excellence – to slip beneath a shirt cuff, every day as well as for grand occasions, and to pass on one day.
