For many men, watches seem to have a deeper meaning than just keeping time. Watches mark special occasions, they tell the world a bit about who you are, and they can, if you’re lucky, connect you to the people in your life who matter most.
At the end of the day, a watch is just a watch—it’s the story behind it that can make it exceptional.
Cooking, too, is craftsmanship. Take making a sauce: you can’t measure an ounce of flavor—it doesn’t exist that way. It’s intangible; you can’t dissect it. Like time. So it’s the same with watches: it’s craftsmanship until you reach a certain level of complexity. Then it’s artistry.
I mean, the guy who invented the tourbillon had to be pretty twisted! Thinking about how when you cross the equator and then come back, the pressure is different, and creating a solution for that—can you imagine?
While Patek Philippe is credited with inventing the wristwatch, the style was largely thought of as a timepiece for women. It was not until the Cartier Santos-Dumont that men began equating the wristwatch with exploits of daring and courage, and imbuing them with all manner of romance and nostalgia—a feeling any true watch lover knows all too well.
Doxa has a rich history with tool watches. They’re a Swiss company, older than Rolex. They had some early success with pocket watches that were extremely accurate, and went on to introduce an eight-day power-reserve dashboard clock for early cars—if you owned the first Mercedes-Benz or Ford and you wanted a clock in it, most likely that would be a Doxa. The company has a history of supplying the military, as well, but by the fifties and sixties, the company wasn’t as relevant.
There are few achievements that resonate as lastingly in the popular imagination as Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first summit of Mount Everest, at 29,029 feet, in 1953. On Hillary’s wrist was this unassuming Rolex Oyster Perpetual Officially Certified Chronometer from 1950.
The Grand Seiko First Series, or the 3180, which predates this one, is really the point when the Japanese had created a watch as good as a Swiss watch.
Like the Buddhist tradition of creating sand mandalas: you spend all this time and emotional energy to make these very beautiful sand drawings, but you know they are only temporary and will soon be gone. I think there’s a real beauty to that concept, and I think of my possessions in that way. It’s also important to cherish the things you have and—this might seem weird to say—to have a relationship with them. You have to honor each object and, at the same time, be ready to let it go.
The best example of when the Omega Speedmaster Professional paid off for NASA was during the Apollo 13 mission, when all power was lost on the Command Module. The only things the astronauts had to time the critical burns to bring the Apollo 13 safely back to earth were their Omega Speedmasters. Most critical was the last burn, which had to be a precise 14 seconds. The commander’s chronograph was used to time the burn. The watch was exact, and the rest is history.
We got the unbelievable chance to photograph a second-generation Omega Speedmaster reference CK2998: the personal watch of Walter “Wally” Schirra—one of the “Original Seven” astronauts of the Mercury program—which he wore during the Mercury-Atlas 8 (Sigma 7) mission, making it the first watch in space.
These were made by Heuer for Abercrombie & Fitch, a company that, before it became known as a shirtless male model fashion brand, was a really cool adventure outfitter. If you were going to climb Everest, or spend a month in the Rockies, you’d go to Abercrombie & Fitch to be outfitted. It was legit.
So taking a moment to wind my watch means giving myself twenty seconds of the day to create a sense of purpose as to how I’m going to use my time—to ask myself, Am I going to live today with intention? It forces you to reflect, because during that tiny window you are literally giving yourself the time.
In Japan, watches aren’t traditionally status symbols; gifting someone a watch is considered to be a bad-luck gesture—you don’t give someone an object that tells them how much time they have left to live. So what the Japanese did with the G-Shock, and with Casios in general, was to eliminate the concept of status and create a covetable watch at a much lower price point.
Unlike all of the other archives I visited, Hermès’s are in Paris, not Switzerland. Hermès as a brand had its roots in the equestrian world, with its saddles and beautiful leather goods. When wristwatches became more popular than pocket watches, there was a need for a watch strap. Since Hermès made such stylish and well-crafted leather goods, it was only natural that watchmakers would pair up with them and make timepieces for them.
It’s like Rocky says to Adrian in Rocky II: “Do you like having a good time? Then you need a good watch!”
I knew all the stories about how the pivot to quartz movements in the 1970s almost devastated the market for Swiss-made mechanical watches. Suddenly, mechanical movements weren’t sexy or modern anymore, and the future belonged to quartz. The shift was so sudden, so violent and seemingly all-consuming, that in 1975, Zenith Radio Corporation, the American company that owned the Zenith Manufacture, whose El Primero had helped pioneer the wrist-worn chronograph in 1969, sent word to the factory in Le Locle, Switzerland: cease production of mechanical watches and destroy all the machines and tools for scrap. Head watchmaker Charles “Charly” Vermot protested directly; when his objections fell on deaf ears, he took another tack by carefully labeling and hiding away the cutting tools, cams, and heavy swage pressing equipment in a false wall behind a bookcase in an attic on the Zenith grounds. Fast-forward a decade, and the quartz movement had failed to fully kill the fascination with craftsmanship and mechanical things. But while there was renewed interest in mechanical movements, the institutional knowledge of how to make them, and even the necessary materials, had all but disappeared in the lightning-fast purges of the quartz revolution. But thanks to Charly Vermot, who had saved the dies and the equipment, Zenith was able to return to producing beautiful mechanical movements. Not only did this help resurrect Zenith, but it also helped other brands; those same early movements found their way into early Rolex Daytona models as well.