The year is 1961 and Elgin's newly formed Design Group have just fashioned the Lord Elgin Electronic, the thinnest, smallest electronic wrist watch manufactured anywhere in the world and released it to market.

The Design Group was then tasked with designing  a new line of fine jeweled watches that would reach a sophisticated quality market and be a representative of Elgin's tradition of fine watch making.

The purpose of this new line was to celebrate the companies 100th anniversary and the line would be an additional line and sit among the Electronic, Starlight, Sportsman, Lord and Lady Elgin watches of the current day.

The newly designed line was called "Elgin-Centura" in anticipation of the 100th anniversary  in 1964.^[1]Elgin Annual Report, 1962

The Elgin-Centura line does in fact exist and isn't a figment of my imagination and 53 years after its design, I'm happy to introduce the belated 100th anniversary line from Elgin, The Elgin-Centura.

This is just one of the known Elgin-Centura models to exist and is the only complete one with an Elgin-Centura box.

This is the tip of the iceberg in relation to the 100th anniversary line from Elgin and we look forward to adding to this developing chapter of Elgin over the coming years.  We do not know how many existed but we have sighted cased examples in 14k yellow gold, white gold and in both Electronic, manual and automatic mechanical movements. 

What makes a Elgin-Centura you wonder ?

• the case should be solid gold, the design studio only completed the design models and they only worked in solid gold to allow for easy scrapping and remodeling of rejected models, if the case isn't solid gold, doubt it
• the dial should have "Elgin/Centura" 

We also know that  these came in the following configurations

• Manual Swiss movement
• Automatics Swiss movement
• American electronic movement
• American manual movement
• Mens and ladies models