Cartier Tank Louis Cartier

The Tank Louis Cartier is a small rectangular watch in gold. Its case is defined by two vertical sidebars, the brancards, which run past the dial at top and bottom and hold the strap between them, so that case and strap read as one line. The brancards are softly rounded. Inside them sits a pale dial with Roman numerals, a minute track drawn like a railway line, and blued steel hands shaped like swords. A blue sapphire cabochon caps the winding crown.

Louis Cartier designed the first Tank in 1917, taking its outline, it is said, from the Renault tanks then crossing the trenches of the Western Front: the brancards are the tracks, the dial the cab. A prototype went to General Pershing. The watch went on sale in 1918, and in 1919 Cartier made six of them. That first model, the Tank Normale, has since been made only intermittently. The version on this page came in 1922, when Cartier rounded the edges of the brancards and gave the watch its founder's name.

The Tank became the watch Cartier is known for and one of the most imitated wristwatches of the century. The house kept extending it, with the curved Cintrée in 1921, the Américaine in 1989 and the Française in 1996, but the codes stayed fixed, and the Tank Louis Cartier has stayed closest to the original drawing. It has been worn, in its various forms, by Jackie Kennedy, Yves Saint Laurent and Princess Diana.

What has changed is mostly inside the case. Cartier now offers the Tank Louis Cartier in four sizes and with hand-wound, automatic and quartz movements, and in 2017, for the Tank's hundredth year, offered it with automatic winding. The medium hand-wound model is a rose-gold case 33.7 by 25.5 millimetres on a leather strap, sold from Cartier's own boutiques and website, more than a century after the first.