Time Flies
The Art and History of the Aviator Watch
IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE A PILOT if you’re not wearing Ray-Bans and a fancy watch? And does wearing a fancy watch make someone a pilot? “Yes” to the former, and “no” to the latter. A watch does not a pilot make. And yet given the last century of the “great aviator watch race,” in which complexity has become style, it could easily be assumed that the quality of the pilot can be judged by the size of his watch and the number of buttons it sports. The vast majority of aviator watches, however, are bought by nonaviators, most of whom don’t realize that the genre existed long before Top Gun’s Maverick was born and that those watches were almost never fancy. Functional yes, fancy no.
There is some debate as to who actually invented the first wristwatch. Was the “arm watch” delivered to Countess Koscowicz of Hungary in 1868 by the Swiss watchmaker, Patek Philippe, first? Guinness World Records says “yes.” Or was the egg-shaped, jewelencrusted beauty ordered for the Queen of Naples on June 8, 1810, and crafted by Abraham-Louis Breguet of Paris number one? That’s how the incredibly detailed Breguet company records tell it. The who-was-first question will always be debated, but there is zero question as to the birth of the first aviator watch. In 1904, Brazilian-born aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, who did most of his work in France, was piloting his airships around the Eiffel Tower, before becoming a fixed-wing pioneer. At that time, the concept of wristwatches was already known, but pocket watches were still the way most men told time. SantosDumont, a pocket-watch guy, found the timepiece too cumbersome to pull out of his pocket while flying. So he asked his friend, the watchmaker Louis Cartier, to make him a watch that he could wear on his wrist. The result was not at all what we think of today when we envision an aviator watch. It was slightly larger than normal for ease of reading, as most aviator watches are, but it was rectangular, not round. It had a vaguely 1940/50s Bulova look to it. As the aviation wristwatch concept spread, however, a “reduced pocket watch” look took over.
Warfare and the Watch
Two major forces made being able to easily and accurately judge time a necessity. The first was the drive for aviators to set records—the fastest, the farthest, the highest. The 25-year period after the Wright Brothers did their thing was a constant race to be the first to do almost everything. Louis Blériot’s 1909 31-minute fearless conquest of 22 miles of water between England and France, deemed by most at the time as being suicidal, was that generation’s Lindbergh moment. His Zenith wristwatch was one of the first. The company apparently had an investment in Blériot, who was later quoted in the papers as saying, “I am very satisfied with the Zenith watch, which I usually use, and I cannot recommend it highly enough to people who are looking for precision.” The first wristwatch endorsement? This at a time when the wristwatch had been worn by women as a piece of costume jewelry for several decades but a man risked getting his “man card” revoked if he used anything other than a handsome, manly looking pocket watch. The second factor that made immediate and precise access to time of prime importance was warfare. As pocket watches became both common and affordable, they became a functioning part of waging war. All the aerial combatants started the war with pocket watches as part of their flying attire. The Germans, however, had them hanging from fobs on their flight suits for quick access but soon designed straps to put them on their wrists or strapped over flying-jacket sleeves. France quickly switched to wristwatches (actually modified pocket watches), but Britain, one of the war’s heavy hitters, didn’t go with that newfangled timepiece until the war was almost over. In
fact, their Mk IV and Mk V pocket watches had longer winding stems (technically called “crowns”) so that they could be attached to the instrument panel. The pocket watches that were developed during the Great War were quickly replaced by the more convenient wristwatch but not before watchmakers incorporated some of the suggestions of their military users, airborne and otherwise. The stage had been set for making aviator wristwatches a part of aerial operations, including calculating time, distance, navigation, range, and fuel consumption. Some of these watches included subdials on their faces, which counted seconds and could be used as stopwatches and perform other functions. When the pocket watch migrated to the wrist, the now time-honored visual characteristics of the aviator watch of today were in place: larger-than-normal dials; bold, easily read numbers; and luminescent hands with a larger-than-normal crown that could be turned with gloved hands.
The Wristwatch as a Tool
Charles Lindbergh’s trip across the pond was as earthshaking as Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon—maybe more so because the lead-up to the moon landing was years in the making and very public; we had time to prepare for the momentous event. Lindbergh’s achievement, however, caught
the world almost by surprise, making him one of the biggest celebrities of the 20th century. It also made him one of the leading experts on what a pilot watch should do for the pilot. Watchmaker Longines took advantage of that fact by having him consult with the company on modifications to be made to its Weems Second-Setting Watch. The resulting Lindbergh Hour Angle Watch of 1931 included markings to the dial and bezel that would make it easier to find longitude based on Greenwich Mean Time. In 1934, the Army Air Corps contracted with Longines, Meylan, and Gallet to produce the Type A-7 watch, which incorporated some of the details of the Lindbergh Watch. It was adopted from a pocket watch and, from the beginning, was meant to be worn strapped around a flight jacket’s sleeve. It was produced with both white and black faces.
World War II and the Legendary A-11
Where the M-1 Garand and the Jeep are often held up as the essential tools of World War II, the A-11 watch was right up there with them in terms of importance and universal use. The pace of war dictated that a new watch capable of surviving less-than-ideal operating condition was needed, so the U.S. Army (among others) developed the A-11 specification. The specification did not define a watch design; rather, it described how the watch was to perform. It was a production standard, neither a model name nor a design designation. The A-11 spec was long and detailed. It called for a dust- or waterproof housing, the ability to withstand extreme temperatures, a 15-jewel “hacking” movement, a mainspring/winding system that would give 30–56 hours of operating time, a tolerance of +/– 30 seconds per day, and a black face with luminescent white numbers and demarcations. The hacking movement allowed the stopping of the second hand by pulling the crown/winding stem. This would allow pilots to set their watches simultaneously to a precise time and synchronize operations to the second. Tens of thousands of the A-11 were produced by Elgin, Waltham, and Bulova; however, they weren’t exactly the same. The A-11 specification was vague enough that the watches could be seen with different bezels, different type fonts, and even white, rather than the specified black, faces. It is, hands down, the most common vintage military timepiece. It is impossible to outline the huge number of watch types that served both sides during WW II. It is equally as impossible, however, to talk about pilot watches without mentioning Germany’s highly respected B-Uhr. At the time that the Reich was preparing for war and developing its bomber force, a specification was released that originally was to emulate the hour-angle indication of the Lindbergh watch, but the idea was dropped, probably because the distances within Europe were so short. The resulting B-Uhr was big: 55mm and impossible to misread. In fact, it was designed to use pocket-watch movements yet still be strapped to the wrist but outside of a flight jacket. Produced by the best Swiss and German watchmakers and intended to be a navigator’s watch, they are highly revered today and seriously collected.