A Short Recap On The History Of Military Watches
Military watches, as their name suggests, were designed to be used in the armed forces. The first army watches were naval pieces, chronometers that worked OK for their purposes, but as other branches of the army – aviation especially – made major technical advances round the time of the second World War, accurate measurement of the seconds became vital.
As the old chestnut goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ and Navigator ( often called ‘Pilot’ ) watches were born. In the Navigator watch design, the seconds bezel allowed the pilot to synchronize the second hand with a correct reference time before takeoff, and to make manual corrections to radio time signals while in flight, thus getting rid of any ‘chronometer error’ and the navigational gaffes that would result.
In World War I seconds continued to be important in both army technology and armed forces watches. The feature that permitted for synchronization between 2 timepieces – continued to enhance and advance. These watches were worn on the exterior of a flight jacket or on the navigator’s thigh.
The Germans also added antimagnetic protection to their chronometers. Within another major Axis power, Seiko produced a superb number of military watches for the Japanese Imperial armed forces and Navy. These watches averaged around 49mm in diameter.
As the times of WWII faded into memory and the strained peace of the ‘Cold War’ became fact, armed forces budgets and armed forces technology boomed. Watchmakers rose to the call by planning an instrument worthy of going into battle with humankind’s strongest weapon. Those were the excellent times of the army watch, though no definite design house can claim full credit for the steps made in that time.
Cold War-era military watches were much bigger than the characteristic US consumer navigators before them. Averaging 36mm in diameter, the making of these watches was moved to Switzerland and the Swiss armed forces watch firms who came to the task with centuries’ old reputations for precision.
Like those before them, these Navigators also featured a matte black dial marked with white Arabic numbers 1-12, and with white indices. The new designs did not have white numbers at cardinal 3, 6, nine, and 12. Another new addition was a shatterproof Perspex acrylic crystal, which protected its huge twelve ligne movement from magnetic fields.
These hand-wound watches were predicted to be water-resistant to 20 feet, including water-resistance under low pressure at operational altitudes, and added a naval dimension to the regular army watch.
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