Buffy Acacia
To fall to the minimum of clock collection can be daunting for beginners who confuse French names and confuse reference numbers. But fortunately, it can be surprisingly simple. Much less A type that is more suffocating than a dive watch and, Snooty preconceptions of Dress Watchpilot watches generally stick to some well-established styles and can then be easily discovered thanks to their singular purpose. Let’s take a closer look at their history and characteristics.
The watches we know today developed as needed for the First World War military, tied the watch to the wrist for convenience and durability. But even before that, pioneering pilots had to make their busy hands available.
Impossible precursor
The most famous example of the first modern-day watch is Cartier Santos Dumont. Louis Cartier created the watch in 1904 at the request of Aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont. Although they had not created their first wristwatch, Zenith, a Swiss brand that was considering a forward, trademarked the terms “Pilot” and “Pilot” in 1888 and 1904, respectively. To date, they have the only right to print the word “pilot” on the clock dial.
Santos Dumont was eventually made public in 1911, and Zenith made a pilot’s watch in 1909 at the intersection of Louis Breott’s English Channel. The designs of these two watches were not able to appear in Zenith with delicate, square cases with Cartier jewelry backgrounds. Looks like a marine chronometer. Later, Cartier Santos is built on dressiness rather than a pilot-centric model, but Zenith’s pilots had a much longer-term impact on pilot style.
The impact of World War II
World War II was actually where the most iconic pilot watch designs were solidified on both sides. The RAF pilots mostly used watches with black or white dials known as the 6B/159, produced by Omega, Longin and Yeager Krull. Stick to the traditional look of poire hands and simple Arabic markers, and because of the quick legibility, it doesn’t fit any modern definition of pilot’s watch aesthetics, but it was an important tool. A-11 watches made for the US military by Elgin, Waltham and Bulova It worked with similar simplicity. One major development is a derivative of the 6B/159 known as CK2129 “Weems” and added a rotating bezel to help pilots calculate longitude. This idea that pilot watches should help with calculations will come back in a big way later.
Luftwaffe’s watches are perhaps the biggest contributor to what we currently consider to be pilot watches, and this may come as a bit of a shock to inexperienced people. The first batch of B-Uhren watches was manufactured in two different styles in 1940 and 1941. The first known as Type A was a bold Arabic numerals and a triangle with two dots instead of the 12 o’clock marker. This was a large case that could even be worn over a flight jacket, which supported fast readability and orientation. Type B variety moved the time marker to the inner ring, and the outer marker displayed minutes. The original five companies that made watches for German pilots, now commonly known as Friger, are A. It was lange & Söhne, Laco, Stowa, Wempe, and IWC. Many of these companies are still To vary in degrees, generate the latest variations of these iconic designs Luxurious.
After World War II, pilot watches focused on from military use to commercial aircraft. As technology developed, aircraft became more complicated and pilots needed more tools to assist them for longer journeys. Breitling, famous for its chronographs, was asked by the American Aircraft Owners and Pilot Association in 1952 to make something special for its members. As a result, logarithmic slide rule bezels became popular in 1940, including logarithmic slide rule bezels for calculating average speed, distance travel, fuel consumption, speed of rise, conversion between miles, nautical miles, and kilometres. Whether all of that functionality is really necessary on an aircraft that already has instrumentation clusters is debate, but the extremely complicated appearance has definitely become synonymous with pilot watches.
Pan-AM and GMT-Master
Of course, when flying through a country, you cannot ignore the fluctuating time zones. Aside from the oddity of the 1925 Longin brand, the 1953 Glycine Airman was the first production watch that could track two time zones simultaneously. It had a 24-hour dial and a rotating bezel, tracking the second timezone. Rolex quickly joined the 1954 GMT Master, taking advantage of additional hands to track a total of three time zones. The GMT-Master, first supplied to Pan-AM pilots, quickly became one of the more popular models of Rolex, thanks to its marketing prowess. The GMT-Master II was introduced in 1981 and remains the most popular example of GMT-enabled pilot watches.
Over the years, they have become generally travel-related, rather than specifically those of pilots, but there is an important distinction between the two types of GMT watches. You can read Jamie’s in-depth article on the Caller vs Traveler discussion, but what it sums up is which hand on the watch can be adjusted independently of others.
In the GMT of a traveler, the main time hand can jump separately from the others, usually at the first crown position. This is useful for people flying around many different time zones and local time, allowing you to lock your home time with GMT hands. Caller GMT, on the other hand, switches between them by having an independent GMT hand and a fixed main hour hand.
If you’re inspired to purchase based on this educational piece, you’ll be happy to know that there are many options for a great pilot watch. Is that one of them? IWC’s Super Lux Lee Freeger is making for Lewis Hamilton Or a Seiko 5 sports style GMT with budget-consciousnessyou can make decisions by knowing how each function has turned out.
