VintageGent’s Menswear Daily

The World’s Most Famous Watch

The most famous watch in the world was donated to the Smithsonian in 1998 by Don Hewitt.

It is a Minerva stopwatch previously owned by a Mr. Arthur Bloom. Mr. Bloom was a television director and one of the founder’s of the perennial news magazine “60 minutes.” He lent it to the production crew and on Oct. 22, 1968, the familar tick of Bloom’s stopwatch greeted America for the first time. The watch is an icon, and has been dramatized and parodied hundreds of times over.

Artie Bloom passed away but the Minverva…now computer generated (as the article informs)…ticks on…

reprinted from http://www.cbsnews.com

‘60 Minutes’ Founder Arthur Bloom Dies

NEW YORK, Jan. 29, 2006

Arthur Bloom (CBS)
Arthur Bloom (CBS)

(CBS)Arthur Bloom, the award-winning CBS News television director responsible for the distinctive on-screen look of >60 Minutes since its debut 37 years ago and who led the modernization of on-screen graphics at CBS News, died at home Saturday of cancer. He was 63 and resided in Grandview-on-Hudson, N.Y.

He was one of the last remaining original 60 Minutes founders still working for the program. Bloom also played a role in helping to train Dan Rather to succeed Walter Cronkite in the CBS News anchor chair in 1981.

Bloom spent his entire 45-year career at CBS and used his keen eye and a symphonic vision of camera work to become one of the medium’s best directors of live political event coverage. His outstanding talent was recognized with the first Lifetime Achievement Award in News Direction from the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1995. The same organization had honored him twice before, once for news direction of CBS News coverage of the 1976 Democratic and Republican conventions and, before that, in 1973 for his work on 60 Minutes.

Most of Bloom’s time was devoted to 60 Minutes; he helped to create and then honed the consistent, classy look of the broadcast. Each week he worked in Studio 33 in the CBS Broadcast Center monitoring the program’s studio production and directing the 60 Minutes correspondents as they taped introductions and tags for their reports. He influenced some of the broadcast’s most basic elements, starting with its famous ticking stopwatch.

The first stopwatch was Bloom’s own. The timepiece symbol began as part of 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt’s idea for “60 minutes of reality” and came to life when Bloom filmed his own Minerva stopwatch. The concept worked well enough to be used at the beginning of the broadcast’s third edition on Oct. 22, 1968.

Soon it was shown between segments, eventually becoming the iconic logo recognized by generations. Bloom updated the logo, but only in barely noticeable ways at intervals of several years. His modernizing touches included the use of slimmer typography and the addition of subtle shading and texture to the logo’s background. He oversaw the stopwatch’s transition from a filmed image to a computer-generated one.

“Artie had an eye for what worked visually and what didn’t – he was invaluable to me,” said Hewitt. “I depended on him to make the broadcast as visually appealing as it turned out to be. He was at my side every step of the way.”

Bloom also helped Hewitt execute the graphic concept for 60 Minutes as a magazine for television, deciding on a mock-up of a magazine page to put behind the correspondent to begin each of the broadcast’s segments. Now also computer-generated, the magazine concept has essentially remained the same.