A gold watch that belonged to the richest passenger on the Titanic has been sold for 1.36 million euros at an auction in the United Kingdom. It was an American buyer who won the tender, at the British auction house Henry Aldridge & Son; the estimates, which ranged between 120 thousand and 180 thousand euros, were literally blown.
The amount exceeds the record reached in 2013 by another object arriving from the sunken ship in the North Atlantic: that year a violin was in fact sold for almost 1.3 million euros; and today the case of that musical instrument was sold for 425,000 euros.
The watch, engraved with the initials JJA, belonged to American businessman John Jacob Astor, who was 47 when the Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912. Astor, considered at the time one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune of 87 million dollars, equivalent to several billion today, died on the ship after helping his wife Madeleine into a lifeboat. Astor’s body was found a week after the disaster, with the 14-karat gold pocket watch among his personal effects.