Ventura

The Ventura debuted in January 1957 at a press conference in New York as the world's first electric watch: its caliber 500 replaced the traditional mechanical mainspring with a small battery, effectively anticipating the coming quartz revolution. The case, with its radically asymmetrical triangular profile, unlike anything else the watch market was producing at the time, was the work of designer Richard Arbib, an automotive designer who had also worked for the US Army during the Second World War: years later Arbib himself would admit that the shape was inspired by the design of a bomb, meant to capture postwar America's technological optimism and forward-looking outlook.

In 1961 Elvis Presley wore a white-gold Ventura in the film Blue Hawaii, cementing it as a pop-culture cult object: according to the brand's historians, Presley owned several examples of the model and used to give them as gifts. The bond between the Ventura and the big screen continued in later years, but it is since 1997 that the watch has gained a second cinematic identity as the official timepiece of the agents in the Men in Black saga, appearing in all four films of the series, including on the wrist of Agent M, played by Tessa Thompson in the most recent installment.

Today the Ventura remains a cornerstone of the Hamilton catalog, produced mainly with quartz movements that perpetuate its original electric spirit, alongside special automatic editions such as the "Elvis80" series dedicated to the centenary of the singer's birth, and skeletonized variants that make the mechanism visible through the asymmetrical case, more than sixty years after the debut of caliber 500.