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IXInstruments of Adventure

ESEN
Index
ESEN
Index

Chapter IX · Act III — Owning Time

Instruments of Adventure

1945–1969

The watch follows us to the limits: the seabed, the sky and the Moon.

After 1945 the watch goes with whoever goes furthest: under the sea, in the cockpit, all the way to the Moon. An instrument is worn not for elegance, but because it works.

The chronograph

Chronograph 00:00.0

Drag to turn it · arrow keys on a keyboard · double-click to face it

A two-pusher chronograph with a 30-minute counter. It works: the time it measures is yours.

  1. 1Pushers
  2. 2Chronograph seconds
  3. 3Minute counter
  4. 4Small seconds

  1. The pusher at two starts the chronograph. The same pusher stops it.

  2. The central seconds hand, independent of the time of day, measures anything: a dive, a flight, a lap.

  3. The counter at three adds up the minutes, up to half an hour.

  4. The pusher at four returns the hands to zero, but only once the chronograph is stopped. Try it.

1969: the race for the automatic chronograph

· Apollo 11: a hand-wound chronograph reaches the Moon

  1. El Primero

    Zenith

    1. unveiled
    2. in the shops

    integrated · 36,000 vibrations an hour, ten a second

    The first high-frequency automatic chronograph. When Zenith’s owners drop mechanical watches for quartz, the watchmaker Charles Vermot hides the tooling in an attic. Rolex will use it in the Daytona from 1988 to 2000.

  2. Calibre 11

    Heuer, Breitling, Hamilton-Büren and Dubois-Dépraz

    1. unveiled in Geneva and New York

    modular: a chronograph module on a micro-rotor calibre · crown on the left

    The “Chrono-Matic” powers Heuer’s Autavia, Carrera and Monaco. With the module on top of the calibre, the crown sits on the left and the pushers on the right.

  3. 6139

    Seiko

    1. on sale in Japan

    integrated · column wheel and vertical clutch · 21,600 vibrations an hour

    Seiko sells it quietly, at first only in Japan. It is the first to pair a column wheel with a vertical clutch, which starts the hand without a jump. One flies on Skylab 4, on William Pogue’s wrist.

ShownOn sale

Who won? It depends on what counts. Zenith showed it first, on 10 January; the Calibre 11 was unveiled on two continents at once on 3 March; Seiko sold it before anyone, on 21 May, though only in Japan.

To the limits

  1. The diving watch

    Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms, made with the French Navy’s combat swimmers, and Rolex’s Submariner, made from that year and shown at Basel in 1954, set the grammar of the diving watch: sealed to about a hundred metres, legible, with a rotating bezel to count the time under water.

  2. Electric

    Hamilton unveils the Electric 500, the first electric watch. In October 1960 comes Bulova’s Accutron, by Max Hetzel: a tuning fork at 360 hertz instead of a balance, guaranteed to a minute a month.

  3. Chosen by NASA

    After tests of heat, cold, vacuum, shock and vibration, NASA chooses the Speedmaster, introduced in 1957: it stayed largely within 5 seconds a day. It first flies on Gemini 3, on 23 March.

  4. On the Moon

    Buzz Aldrin wears his Speedmaster on the lunar surface: the first watch on the Moon. Neil Armstrong leaves his in the lunar module as a backup, because its electronic timer has failed.

The Line of Precision

The error a day of each chapter’s clocks, on a logarithmic scale. The line moves on with the story: each chapter draws its own stretch.

This chapter’s precision

Essen and Parry’s caesium1955
≈ 1 s in 300 years
  1. c. 1390 BCE: Clepsydra, ≈ half an hour a day
  2. c. 1386: Foliot tower clock, ≈ 15 min a day
  3. 1656: Huygens’s pendulum, ≈ 15 s a day
  4. c. 1715: Graham’s regulator, a few seconds a week
  5. 1761: Harrison’s H4, 5 s in 81 days
  6. 1889: Riefler regulator, ≈ 0.01 s a day
  7. 1921: Shortt-Synchronome clock, ≈ 1 s a year
  8. 1955: Essen and Parry’s caesium, ≈ 1 s in 300 years

This chapter’s sources