The intriguing history of digital time display
Digital watches in the 1970s may have been unprecedented, but mechanically actuated digital time displays can be traced back to pocket watches from the 1830s.
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Announcing the new Pulsar Time Computer in the early 1970s, the Hamilton Watch Company advertised its pioneering electronic digital watch as “the first completely new way to tell time in 500 years.” It became an instant icon. With a bright-red LED screen activated by a button, the Pulsar captured the imagination of a public that associated computers with hulking mainframes. The US$2,100 ($A2700) timepiece was soon spotted on the wrists of technophiles both real and imagined, from President Gerald Ford to James Bond.
But serious watch collectors knew that Hamilton’s boast was bogus. The Pulsar’s quartz-calibrated microcircuitry was unprecedented, but mechanically actuated digital time displays could be traced back to pocket watches from the 1830s, and mechanical digital wristwatches appeared as early as the 1920s. The first completely new way to tell time was in fact a novelty many times over. And each time — as Hamilton would learn at great expense when the market was swamped with cheap imitations — the trend passed in a flash.
We are now in the midst of another major comeback, not only with the onslaught of smart watches but also with the debut of innovative new mechanical timepieces such as F.P. Journe’s Vagabondage series and the A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk. Although history tells us to be wary, present-day watchmakers — at least those building movements with gears and springs — are familiar with their digital forebears as never before, and the past is actively informing new creations. After nearly two centuries of serial reinvention, digital may finally be emerging as an authentic tradition.
Part 1
The first major episode in the history of digital time indication foreshadows the Pulsar moment in both boldness and disappointment. It was 1881, and the International Watch Company was in need of a standout product after struggling for more than a decade to establish a market. Somehow the new owner, Johannes Rauschenbach-Schenk, learned of an invention by an Austrian father and son — both named Josef Pallweber — and decided that their mechanism could turn his business around.
The invention was an under-dial module for digitally displaying the time on a pocket watch. Digits were painted on discs visible through windows on the watch face, with hours on the top and minutes on the bottom. Instead of turning gradually, the discs jumped every 60 seconds.
Although Abraham-Louis Breguet included jumping hour hands on some pocket watches in the early 19th century, and companies including Le Roy used numbered hour discs as early as 1830, the Pallweber system was the first to combine these ideas in a fully digital time indication. “It was a radical new way of showing the time in a time of technological change,” says IWC museum curator David Seyffer. “Mr. Rauschenbach had to have it, and he paid a hell of a lot of money for the patent.” The overall investment, including the cost of putting the watches into production, was more than US$10 ($A12.8) million in today’s money
Initially it looked like Rauschenbach had made a good bet. The timepiece was marketed as “the watch without hands,” and the IWC workshop couldn’t keep up with demand. But the mechanism proved more difficult to manufacture than Rauschenbach envisioned. The discs took considerable energy to turn because they were heavy and friction was required to hold them steady. At first the total running time for a Pallweber was less than 24 hours. Although dozens of changes in design and materials incrementally improved performance, manufacturing of the testy movements remained inefficient. Around 65 percent of each mechanism for the men’s Pallweber had to be crafted by hand. As a result, production of a Pallweber cost the company nearly twice the outlay for an ordinary movement. “They had huge plans to capture the whole U.S. market,” says Seyffer. With limited manufacturing capacity and high expenses, they never stood a chance.
Meanwhile other companies caught on to the digital trend and started to engineer their own mechanisms. These look-alikes took Rauschenbach by surprise, even more than the difficulty of putting Pallwebers into production. “He really believed that the Pallweber patent protected the digital way of showing the time,” says Seyffer. “Judges all over the world ruled that the patent only protected the mechanical means.”
Over the course of the 1880s, the market was flooded. By the tally of watch historian Alex Kuhn, more than 36 distinct movements were produced by 11 manufacturers, including Cortébert, Minerva, Wittnauer, and Lange.
During this period, operating in an increasingly crowded market, IWC was able to sell an estimated 20,000 timepieces. “But then suddenly in the 1890s, digital displays weren’t fashionable anymore,” says Seyffer. “People went back to the traditional way of telling the time.” IWC and other companies ceased production. A bitterly disappointed Rauschenbach turned his attention to precision chronometry, and the futuristic watch without hands was unceremoniously consigned to the past.
Part 2
In the early 20th century, people started to process time in a strikingly new way. Advocates of scientific management decreed that work hours should be strictly apportioned, and employees should be carefully monitored so that their labour could undergo cost analysis. Employees themselves facilitated this modern form of capitalism by punching in and out on mechanical time clocks. At least twice a day, they saw a digital time stamp on their punch cards.
Although the primary manufacturer of time clocks was the International Business Machine Corporation of New York, the development did not go unnoticed in Switzerland. In the early 1920s, Audemars Piguet began making wristwatches with a digital time indication. “The company was always interested in what was most modern,” says Audemars Piguet historian Michael Friedman. “And time clocks were the most prolific clocks of the era.”
So began another digital watch fad, apparently oblivious to the Pallweber mania of the 1880s. This time the jumping action was confined to the hours. (The minutes were also displayed on a disc, situated below the hours indication, but that disc rotated continuously.)
As Friedman observes, the system was essentially equivalent to a traditional calendar mechanism. “It’s a matter of under-dial work, of cadrature, which was very well established in Vallée de Joux watchmaking,” he says. Unlike the Pallweber movement, which was a genuine technological breakthrough, Friedman views the Audemars Piguet digital display as “a design-driven innovation.”
The modern design aesthetic was applied to every element of this timepiece. Rectangular in form, Audemars Piguet jumping-hour watches were distinguished by bold Arabic numerals and angular Art Deco cases. They looked like machines. That was no accident, observes Friedman: “Watches are not siloed objects, but are part of the culture.” The reciprocal relationship between the era and the digital time indication made digital watches enormously popular up until the Great Depression. (In addition to Audemars Piguet, Deco-styled jump-hour watches were produced by companies ranging from Rolex to Elly.) And then, as the stock market crashed, they vanished once again.
Part 3
As an apprentice to the famous clockmaker Johann Gutkaes in the early 1840s, Ferdinand A. Lange worked on an unusual clock for Dresden’s opera house. The clock showed the time digitally, with jumping hour and 5-minute indications arranged horizontally, foreshadowing the horizontal display of time made commonplace by the Hamilton Pulsar and its electronic-digital successors.
More than a century and a half after the Semper Opera House opened, A. Lange & Söhne decided to develop a digital wristwatch inspired by Gutkaes’s clock. Unlike the modestly sized two-tier digital displays of antique watches, the company sought a horizontal display with very large digits. The watchmakers were well aware of the challenges they faced: the problems of Pallwebers writ large. “Instantaneously moving big discs every minute requires a lot more energy than moving hands,” says Lange director of product development Anthony de Haas. A powerful spring is needed. “But if your mainspring is too strong,” he explains, “you can’t power an escapement with it.”
In search of a solution, de Haas researched the past, in particular Lange’s own legacy as a manufacturer of digital pocket watches. Lange technicians made computer simulations of new movements based on the Pallweber and also the Dürrstein system, which was the mechanism Lange used in the 1880s to circumvent IWC’s Pallweber patent. The Dürrstein showed promise, says de Haas, as it had the advantage of running the digital display on a separate gear train. But he found that it consumed too much power. Instead he opted to ditch digital precedents completely, learning from their inadequacies.
The mechanism he developed adapts the classic remontoir d’égalité. It uses a mainspring twice as powerful as normal, but the power is conveyed to a secondary spring every minute, as the discs jump. The secondary spring powers the escapement for the next 60 seconds. “You not only have a watch that indicates time digitally,” de Haas says, “but it’s also a very precise watch because it has constant force.” Released in 2009, the Zeitwerk has subsequently undergone numerous permutations — including a decimal chiming mechanism — further exploiting the remontoir’s energy distribution.
Concurrent with Lange’s developments, other contemporary watchmakers have revisited the history of digital watchmaking, resulting in other innovations. One of the most unconventional is F.P. Journe.
Since 2004, Journe has systematically explored combinations of digital and analog time display with his Vagabondage series, taking inspiration (and forewarning) from digital pocket watches in his personal collection. “The mechanisms of antique pocket watches with digital indications are really catastrophic mechanically,” he says. “Much precaution is needed to avoid the numerous traps.” He ultimately overcame the problems of accuracy, and the related challenge of providing sufficient power, by developing his own remontoir d’égalité.
With the Vagabondage II of 2010, the mechanism imparted constant force every minute, equivalent to the Zeitwerk. This year Journe used the same system to release energy at 60 times that rate, one revolution per second, creating the world’s first mechanical timepiece with digital seconds.
The range of digital displays and mechanisms that have appeared over the past decade is unprecedented, with recent novelties released by companies including Hublot, Chanel, Hautlence, and MB&F. Michael Friedman is not surprised. “We’re moving deeper and deeper into the digital age, and these analog watches that flirt with digital aesthetics are appealing to contemporary collectors,” he says. “You know something is gear driven, yet the display is incredibly futuristic and contemporary. That’s an exciting dichotomy.”
Over at Lange, de Haas holds a similar opinion. He’s observed that the Zeitwerk has been especially popular with the business leaders of Silicon Valley and technophiles more broadly. “The younger generation is accustomed to digital displays,” he says. “It’s how they see time.”
Ironically, the Hamilton Pulsar may have made possible the transition of digital-mechanical timekeeping from trend to tradition, by priming the revolution that made quartz-based digital time indication ubiquitous. The Pulsar was not the first completely new way to tell time in 500 years — but the Pulsar age was the first to free mechanical watchmakers to pursue watchmaking for its own sake.
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How the Most Rare and Valuable Watches Are Traded Among Elite Collectors
Some of the world’s most interesting watches spend decades being traded privately before we learn about them.
Before social media became the lingua franca of the watch world, there were forums. And on those forums, collectors—especially collectors of vintage Rolex—often traded timepieces amongst each other.
The advent of Instagram in the early 2010s, coupled with the explosion in interest in vintage timepieces, drew attention to this corner of the watch world, and with that attention came increased competition for the finest examples. In the case of six- and seven-figure watches, high-end dealers, like James Lamdin, founder and vice president of vintage and pre-owned watches at Analog:Shift, became trusted intermediaries, negotiating sales for pieces not once or twice but often multiple times as they made the rounds of the collector community.
“There are watches out there that may not be massively rare by reference, but are by example,” Lamdin tells Robb Report. “Tropical patina, ghosted bezel, or celebrity provenance—it’s that watch. When those watches go into a collection, usually it’s with the implicit understanding that they’re valuable and people will want them from you and will make you a profit when you sell them.”
The best dealers have built relationships with collectors around the world and often have first right of refusal when those pieces come back to market. But even still, the most coveted models can still slip through their fingers.
Eric Wind, of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, Fla., has lost and found some of the world’s most storied watches. In 2015, when he was vice president, senior specialist at Christie’s in New York, Wind came across a “super rare” 1957 Audemars Piguet Ref. 5516 perpetual calendar that had languished in rural Florida until the nephew of the original owner consigned it to Christie’s. The first perpetual calendar wristwatch to feature a leap-year indicator, the piece was one of just nine made by Audemars Piguet in the 1950s. Wind considers it “the one in the best condition.”
He showed it to one of Christie’s better-known clients, Patrick Getreid, owner of the OAK Collection, who purchased it in 2015 for $545,000. In 2023, Getreid consigned it to Christie’s in Hong Kong. That’s when Wind decided to give the piece another shot.
“I had registered to bid on it but at the last minute, I got cold feet,” Wind continues. “It was starting kind of high compared with what Getreide had paid for it. I was bidding remotely from Florida, but when no one else is bidding, you’re kind of wondering if you’re a genius or a fool. Is there something everyone else knows that I don’t? The question was about market value. The watch ended up passing and I purchased it via private sale—or private treaty, as it’s known—after the sale. I had two clients who really wanted it. I offered it to both, but one was more ready to pull the trigger and he got it. It never saw the light of day.” That Audemars Piguet perpetual calendar, Wind says, “remains one of my top five watches on the planet.”
As he reflected on the piece’s winding journey, Wind considered his own role in its comings and goings. “It was fun to be part of the lifecycle of that watch, from when it was discovered in rural Florida and consigned to Christie’s, and then sold to a great collector, who sold it again,” he says. “I imagine it will come back to me at some point. I don’t know if it will be two years from now or 40 years.”
Another grail watch that Wind helped shepherd to a client was an exceptional Paul Newman Rolex Daytona Panda reference 2623 with a full set and a tropical dial that was sold by a small Swedish auction house just under a decade ago. “Another dealer got it,” Wind explains. “I was still at Christie’s, and I fell in love with the watch. This dealer who had it for a year then sold it to an Italian dealer, who then sold it to a collector in Asia. I was tracking the watch on Instagram and saw the collector post it. By that time, I had become a dealer.
“I made an offer to the collector to purchase it on behalf of my client,” he adds. “It had been owned by a Swedish boat captain and had been given to him by the family he worked for, the equivalent of the Rockefellers in Sweden. We had to arrange shipment to the U.S. by Malca-Amit armored transport. Whenever these high-value watches move around, you have to deal with armored shipments, customs, proper transportation, and a lot of paperwork. It takes some time but it’s well worth it.”
Both the AP perpetual calendar and Daytona were original and unpolished—“the kind of watches I look for,” Wind says. “It’s funny how watches circle around. Within the high-end watch world, we’re not talking about thousands and thousands of watches. We’re talking about a relatively small amount of great watches.”
Eric Ku, a high-end vintage dealer in Northern California, certainly knows the drill.
About 15 years ago, he was offered a first-of-its-kind 1996 Rolex Cosmograph Daytona “Rainbow” reference 16599 in white gold on a leather strap.
“I’ve been hunting jeweled Rolexes for a really long time, before it was a cool thing,” Ku, cofounder of the online auction site Loupe This, says. “The watch first surfaced to me around 15 years ago. It was offered to me by a dealer in the Middle East and was coming from, allegedly, a member of a royal family. At the time, the pricing was completely different than it is today. After going back and forth, I offered $130,500 and the seller wanted $136,462. I lost the watch. I was gutted. I’d been stalking the watch. But at the time, relative to the market, it didn’t make sense for me. It was a really tough time, might have been around the financial crisis. I felt confident it would come back to me, but it didn’t.
“Then, in 2012, Rolex introduced its new rainbow Daytona,” Ku says. “I had no doubt about the authenticity of the watch I’d lost out on, but seeing the new rainbow Daytona completely validated me and erased any scintilla of a doubt that I had about the watch. Fast forward a couple years: The watch was offered to me again privately, by a different person in the Middle East at a significant multiple of the original offering—let’s say in the mid six-figures. I bought it.”
In 2017, Ku sold the watch to an important collector based overseas, “a person of very high taste and connoisseurship who appreciated the rarity of that watch,” he says. The collector, by Ku’s reckoning, also appreciated the story of its journey. “Dealers and old collectors always like trading war stories,” he says. “What’s the one thing that got away and then it came back? The collector got sold on the story.”
Now, the watch is coming back to market on Nov. 8 at Phillips Geneva, where it’s being offered in a sale dedicated to neo-vintage timepieces (Reloaded: The Rebirth of Mechanical Watchmaking 1980-1999) and is estimated to fetch in excess of $5.93 million.
“It’s probably the sexiest watch of the season,” Ku says.
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Golden Touch
Discretion is the better part of glamour at the glittering Maybourne Beverly Hills.
Los Angeles does not want for star wattage, but for years now, the city’s hotel scene has been a little lacklustre. So news that the beloved Montage hotel has been completely redone under the Maybourne brand (the British powerhouse that operates Claridge’s, The Connaught, and Berkeley Hotels in London, and the recently opened Maybourne Riviera on the Côte d’Azur) should come as a boon to Australians looking for a new Tinseltown bolthole.
Situated within Beverly Hills’ famous Golden Triangle, just north of Wilshire Boulevard and Four Season’s Beverly Wilshire, and one block from the world-renowned luxury retailers, restaurants and celeb-spotting of Rodeo Drive, The Maybourne Beverly Hills offers a chic retreat from the designer flexing at its doorstep; a rare escape in the heart of this storied enclave that flies under the radar like a cap-wearing celeb dodging the paparazzi.
Set amid the manicured, Mediterranean-style Beverly Cañon Gardens plaza, which unfolds from the hotel’s west entrance, the new incarnation of Montage Beverly Hills (55 suites and 20 private residences, each with a balcony or patio with a courtyard or city view) still evokes the grand estates of Old Hollywood while feeling like you’re in a European mainstay.
Revealing a restrained new guestroom and suite design by Bryan O’Sullivan, a blue-chip art collection and some of the most solicitous staff in town, the Maybourne speaks in a laid-back Californian accent but still holds true to the luxury touchpoints of five-star service for which one of the world’s most exclusive neighbourhoods—and hotel brands—is known.
“It’s reassuringly British when it comes to service—it’s a culture of yes,” says Linden Pride, the Australian restaurant and bar owner behind the award-winning Caffe Dante in New York and Bobbie’s, the new speakeasy opening this month below Neil Perry’s new Song Bird restaurant in Sydney’s Double Bay (page 40). Pride should know; he lived at the Maybourne for almost a year while he and his partner, Nathalie Hudson, set up Dante, the stunning new restaurant and bar on the hotel’s ninth-floor rooftop. “Looking out from the roof onto lemon and olive trees, it’s easy to forget that you’re in Southern California, not Europe.”
Opened last year, Dante has quickly become one of the hottest reservations in town, luring in celebrities from Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin to the entire Real Madrid soccer team. Like its sister outposts in New York (besides the Greenwich Village original, a West Village location opened in 2020), the focus here is on non-threatening antipasti and aperitivi in a produce-driven menu of fresh familiar stalwarts, with the addition of wood-fired dishes from a giant pizza oven at the heart of the room. Just as it does in New York, a negroni cart does the rounds, and each afternoon is welcomed with a martini happy hour.
It’s all fittingly Cali-chill. The only drama in the place is a striking ceiling fresco by Los Angeles artist Abel Macias, which dominates the 146-seat room. “Nathalie and I had just been to Europe when we decided to open up here,” Pride recalls, “and the Sistine Chapel blew us away. When we saw the domed ceiling in this room it was a no-brainer.”
Dante joins a string of newcomers in the area, including New York transplants Café Boulud, Marea and Cipriani. Don’t look now, but with arrivals like the Maybourne and Dante, one of the world’s stuffiest cities—yes, Beverly Hills is its own 14.8 km² metropolis—might just be entering a new golden age.
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White Lotus-ing? How Hit Films and TV Shows Are Inspiring Elite Travelers to ‘Set-Jet’ Across the Globe
It’s not just The White Lotus. Prestige TV and blockbuster films set in far-flung destinations are driving bookings like never before.
“As seen on TV” may have lowbrow connotations, but the recent glut of award-winning shows and films set in alluring, far-flung locations is causing an unprecedented run on the world’s best hotels. Call it set-jetting: planning your vacation around a destination featured in a popular series or movie. And while romantic suites and beloved characters have gotten people on planes since the golden age of film, what has changed is how central beautiful venues have become to plots.
“The way that The White Lotus used the destination to tell the story was really unique,” says Misty Belles, an executive at the global travel-adviser network Virtuoso. It also made its settings—the Four Seasons resorts in Maui and Taormina, Sicily—nigh un-bookable. And it’s hardly the only example: “Paris wasn’t hurting for eyes, but Emily in Paris showed the city in a more playful way,” Belles notes. “And people weren’t exactly flocking to Richmond before Ted Lasso.”
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The trend is so strong that a property doesn’t even need to be connected to a show to benefit from its boom. Henley Vazquez, cofounder of the New York–based travel agency Fora, points to Bridgerton’s impact on English estate hotels.
“Heckfield Place [used to be] a hard sell,” she says of the five-star Georgian mansion in Hampshire. “Now, people are dying to go there. It wasn’t featured in Bridgerton, but it’s just that kind of place.”
Others insist on the real deal. Jennifer Schwartz, managing director of Authentic Explorations, works with one family to build trips based on the Game of Thrones universe.
HBO
“They went out of their way in Portugal” to visit Monsanto, the setting for Dragonstone in House of the Dragon, she notes. “It’s definitely a criterion on which they choose where they want to vacation.”
For travelers who want more than simply to follow in their favorite character’s footsteps, London’s Black Tomato takes things several steps further. Since 2023, it has planned high-octane itineraries based on the James Bond franchise and works with the films’ producers, Eon Productions, to make you feel like an MI6 agent. (Some trips even offer lessons with Daniel Craig’s stunt double, Lee Morrison.)
The 007 success has inspired more such trips. “We’ve just recently launched itineraries inspired by Yellowstone and Ripley, focusing on Montana and Wyoming and Italy, respectively,” says cofounder Tom Marchant.
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Still, it’s important to remember that sharp camerawork—and editing—accounts for a lot of the on-screen magic. Schwartz, of Authentic Explorations, notes that “the White Lotus hotel” in Sicily is “not super accessible, but it’s filmed as if the beach is right there.” In reality, the shore club from the show’s second season is 133 miles away. “People go to the place and they’re like, ‘You have to get in a car to go to the beach? What do you mean?’ ”
So where shouldn’t you go? Netflix’s The Perfect Couple will likely send hordes to Nantucket next summer, and The White Lotus’s third season, set on the Thai island Koh Samui, has already caused a local spike—and it’s not even on the air yet.
Bookings of Virtuoso’s properties in the region are up 38 percent since the show was announced. Luckily, Belles says, the effect doesn’t linger. “We typically see a good two-year impact on a set-jetting destination.”
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This New Line of Megayachts Brings Modern, Loft-Style Living to the High Seas
Benetti’s first B.Loft model spans an impressive 213 feet
Benetti has been working on something quite, well, lofty.
The Italian shipyard unveiled a new line of megayachts on Monday. Designed to entirely new architectural criteria, the B.Loft range will bring a contemporary residential feel to supersized cruisers. Each B.Loft model will combine “the volumes of a villa with the luminosity of a loft,” according to Benetti.
Penned by Italian studio Cassetta Yacht Designers, the B.Loft yachts will be characterised by sleek lines, minimalist profiles, and expansive glazing. The line will include three models, with the B.Loft 65M (pictured here) being the first to be revealed. The new 213-footer will sit in the middle of the range, with at least one smaller and one larger model joining the lineup at a later date.
The living area.
Benetti
The inaugural B.Loft showcases a steel hull, an aluminum superstructure, and multi-layered decks that create openness and flow. With an impressive beam just shy of 35 feet, the spacious yacht offers six cabins for 12 guests and nine for 13 crew. The interior combines modern matte surfaces and swathes of natural teak, creating an elegant environment for entertaining.
The standout feature of the B.Loft 65M is the “cabana” on the main deck. A cut above an ordinary beach club, the panoramic area is outfitted with three glass doors that afford 270-degree views and two fold-down wings that create up to 430 square feet of relaxation space. The glass-bottomed pool on the main deck above allows different lights, patterns, and shapes to fill the space.
Benetti
Speaking of the main deck, the semi-enclosed aft area leads to a spacious interior lounge and a luxurious lobby. The nearby dining area features floor-to-ceiling windows and a large, central table that is perfect for entertaining. This deck also includes a fully equipped galley and a second lobby with a winter garden and more fold-out balconies.
Benetti
The upper deck is also sure to impress, with towering 13-foot ceilings and a lobby that Benetti says is longer and more spacious than those typically found on yachts of this size. Again, a glass-bottomed hot tub on the sundeck above lets the light shine through the water onto the area below.
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Benetti didn’t dive into propulsion, but says the B.Loft 65M will be able to cover 5,000 nautical miles at 10 knots. That’s not bad speed or range for a floating loft.
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Omega Just Re-Released Its First Watch to Ever Go to Space
The watchmaker has dropped a new version of the Speedmaster astronaut Walter Schirra wore in space in 1962.
It was one small decision for Omega, one giant win for watch collectors.
The Swiss watchmaker has re-released the first Speedmaster that went to space, combining classic 1950s styling with modern horological innovations.
Launched in 1959, the original watch (Ref. CK 2998) was the successor to the first Speedmaster model that Omega unveiled in 1957. It featured a symmetrical 39.7 mm case, a dark bezel, and slender Alpha hands that set it apart from the previous iteration. NASA astronaut Walter “Wally” Schirra famously wore the second-gen Speedy on the Mercury-Atlas 8: Sigma 7 mission of 1962, earning it the title of “first Omega in Space.” Omega did drop a model in 2012 to honour this feat but discontinued it in 2021. The “First Omega in Space” is now back, with a bold new look.
The contemporary release takes design cues from the CK 2998, maintaining the same polished-brushed stainless-steel case, triple-register chronograph display, and domed crystal. The CVD-coated dial is finished in a grey-blue hue that appeared on some CK 2998 models produced in the 1960s, while the black aluminium bezel features the signature “Dot-Over-Ninety” tachymeter bezel synonymous with the earliest Speedys. The hour markers and Alpha hands are filled with Super-LumiNova in a golden hue that gives an aged quality. In keeping with that historic feel, vintage Omega logos have been added to the dial and crown.
The major difference between the two is the movement. The original was powered by the Calibre 321, while the modern edition is driven by the Calibre 3861. The hand-wound movement, which has the all-important Master Chronometer certification from METAS, offers the highest standard of precision, performance, and magnetic resistance, according to Omega. It has a frequency of 21,600 beats per hour (3 Hz) and a power reserve of 50 hours.
The new Speedmaster also has a couple of special, sentimental touches. The caseback showcases an integrated Seahorse medallion and the engravings “Speedmaster,” “The First Omega in Space” and “October 3, 1962.” The latter is the date that the Mercury-Atlas spacecraft took off from the Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, orbiting the Earth six times, before landing in the Pacific Ocean. Schirra was the sole occupant of the spacecraft, completing the nine-hour mission with his trusty Speedmaster on his wrist.
The new Speedmaster First Omega in Space costs $11,125 with a leather strap or $11,780 with a steel bracelet.
