To many people, the Cartier Tank is the Platonic ideal of a dress watch. I have a personal soft spot for the iconic model as well ? I fell in love with the watch?s quadrilateral design at a young age and it drove my watch obsession that continues to this day. While the long-established square design has never really changed, its presentation has varied a number of times. Here are three of the more atypical Cartier Tanks that have graced wrists over the past century-plus. 
The Cartier Tank á Guichet
The 1928 Cartier Tank á Guichet.
If you paid attention to 2017’s Phillips Winning Icons auction that featured Paul Newman?s record-breaking Rolex Daytona, you may have noticed something curious about Lot 31. That 1931 Cartier Tank á Guichet ended up selling for $131,250, but the real story behind the unorthodox design goes back three years earlier to 1928 when the watch was created with a jumping hour in response to a growing interest in timepieces with a numerical display. Unlike modern jumping hour and minute watches ? think the A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk ? the Tank á Guichet doesn?t even have a visible dial. Rather, it featured a large expanse of metal with two tiny windows (guichets) that displayed the hour and minute. Cartier released multiple versions of the watch that often featured very different placement of the windows and crowns, sometimes the crown would be at 12 or 3 o?clock and the minute opening would be at 12 or 6 o?clock. These watches are exceed...