A gold pocket watch recovered from the body of the wealthiest man aboard the Titanic is up for auction and could sell for as much as £150,000, or nearly $190,000.  

The Gold Pocket Watch of the Wealthiest Man on the Titanic 

According to auction house Henry Aldridge & Son in Wiltshire, England, the auction for businessman John Jacob Astor IV's 14-carat gold Waltham pocket watch begins Saturday. The starting bid is £60,000, or almost $75,000.

Wirral Globe reported that the watch, engraved with the initials JJA, was found along with Astor's body when his remains were recovered. The prominent member of the wealthy Astor family, who was 47 then, went down with the ship on April 14, 1912, after ensuring that his 18-year-old wife Madeleine was aboard a lifeboat.

According to the auction house, Astor asked if he could join his wife on a lifeboat due to her "delicate condition, but was told he needed to wait until all the women and children were aboard.

Astor then reportedly lit a cigarette and went off to smoke with author Jacques Futrelle, who also died when the Titanic sank. The two were among the more than 1,500 individuals who perished. 

The auction house said Astor and Madeleine, who got married in September 1911, took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt while they waited "for the scandalous gossip to calm down." They were headed back to the US when the Titanic hit an iceberg.

Astor's body was found by the steamer CS McKay-Bennett in the Atlantic Ocean a week after the Titanic sank, and his exquisite gold Waltham pocket watch was found. His wife survived.

The auction house wrote: "The watch itself was completely restored after being returned to Colonel Astor's family and worn by his son, making it a unique part of the Titanic story and one of the most important pieces of horological history relating to the most famous ship in the world."

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Net Worth of the Richest Man on the Titanic 

The auction house said that John Jacob Astor IV "is well known as the richest passenger aboard the RMS Titanic and was thought to be among the richest people in the world at that time, with a net worth of roughly 87 million US dollars - equivalent to several billion dollars today." 

Before he died, Astor was a business magnate, investor, real estate developer, writer, and a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish-American War. Astor's son Vincent reportedly gifted the gold pocket watch to his godson, William Dobbyn, in 1935.

The sale of the watch comes as other items from the Titanic wreckage have also been auctioned, most recently a picture taken on April 16, 1912, that shows the iceberg.

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