THE ENDURING APPEAL OF OMEGA’S SPEEDMASTER

Around for 60 years, and forever refined in detail

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I wrote about my visit to the superb Omega Museum in Biel/ Bienne, the town on the German/French language border in Switzerland where Omega is based. It was a visit that I am unlikely to forget as it was there that I fell in love with a 60-year-old… the Omega Speedmaster. It would be an exaggeration to say that I have thought of little else since, but it has reminded me why I love watches and it has finally dawned on me that, if there were a checklist for collectability, then the Speedmaster would fulfil pretty much all the criteria.

It is a genre-defining classic: with its 3-6-9 subdial configuration, and easily legible hour and minute markers, it is the prototypical chronograph par excellence.

In its day it was innovative: Omega’s first watch with a tachymetric scale on the bezel.

It has been around for ages: this year’s 60th anniversary advertising shows that those six turbulent decades have served up a banquet of horological choice.

Which leads me to another crucial attribute: there is an abundance of forensic detail to keep the watch geek happy for more than one lifetime. The term icon is so overused as to be nearly meaningless, but the Speedmaster is a watch that deserves to be called an icon and, as such, collectors have, figuratively speaking, crawled over every detail of the myriad permutations of this watch.

There are people so fanatical about the Speedmaster that they have gone to the trouble of noting and documenting not just the differing hand shapes; not just the varying index lengths; not just the type of ‘O’ – round or slightly squashed oval – with which Omega is spelled on the dial. No, they have even measured the ratio of the horizontal stroke of the ‘G’ to the size of the whole letter (bear with me…), thus arriving at the knowledge that on a type A1 dial from 1957-1958/9 the horizontal stroke is a full 65% of the width of the G, whereas the roughly contemporaneous A2 dial has a short horizontal stroke equivalent to 35%.

‘A WELL-MAINTAINED EXAMPLE FROM THE 1960S CAN BE WORN AS EASILY AS A MODERN WATCH’

If you ask me, these extremes of difference would be too unsettling to wear; instead I prefer the balance of the A4 dial from 1959-1960/1, the horizontal G-stroke of which strikes a nice balance at 55%. Now imagine that level of microscopic analysis applied to every letter, number, index and other marking on countless (although I am sure someone has counted them) dials over a 60-year production run, and you begin to get an idea of the sort of passions this watch stirs.

And the watch is famous: having been to the moon on several occasions, it is so well known for its role in conquering man’s final frontier that often it is known as the Moonwatch – although in the world of horizontal G-stroke length analysis there are, of course, quirks and caveats such as the apparently self-contradictor y pre-moon Moonwatch. But the issue of when a Moonwatch is not a Moonwatch is somewhat above my lowly pay grade: it is instead a subject that warrants – and has received – an entire book, Moonwatch Only, by Grégoire Rossier and Anthony Marquié.

However, before it went into space and before it became the subject of forensic examination, the Speedmaster was a watch for car guys, marketed squarely at the ‘man who reckons time in seconds’. Early advertising showed not a space rocket – the Speedmaster was in space as early as 1962, but Omega only found out about this in 1965 – but ‘two sports car enthusiasts racing the clock’. The photograph depicts the co-driver setting his chronograph, which, after travelling a mile in 33 seconds, he stops and then uses the ‘tachoproductometer’ to read off a speed of 110mph.

The same early advertisement boasts of shock protection, anti-magnetic properties and the fact that it has been ‘triple sealed’ and is water-resistant to 200 metres, which means that a well-maintained example from the 1960s can be worn – within reason – as easily as a modern watch, without having to worry that every jolt might result in a hefty repair bill.

Although not cheap, a classic Speedmaster is still great value for money. It offers all the same sort of involvement, detail and evocative period charm that is experienced by the collector of Rolex Daytonas, only at a fraction of the price.