Electronics Blog

Military watches, as their name suggests, were developed for the armed forces. The 1st military watches were naval pieces, chronometers that worked OK for their purposes, but as other branches of the army – aviation particularly – made major technical advances round the time of the second World War, correct measurement of the seconds became crucial.

As the old chestnut goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ and Navigator ( often called ‘Pilot’ ) watches were born. In the Navigator watch design, the seconds bezel permitted the pilot to synchronize the second hand with a correct reference time before takeoff, and to make manual corrections to radio time signals while in flight, therefore getting rid of any ‘chronometer inaccuracies’ and the navigational gaffes that would result.

During World War I seconds continued to be important in both army technology and armed forces watches. The feature that permitted for synchronization between two watchs – continued to enhance and advance. These watches were worn on the outside of a flight jacket or on the navigator’s thigh.

The Germans also added antimagnetic protection to their chronometers. Within another major Axis power, Seiko produced an amazing number of armed forces watches for the Japanese Imperial armed forces and Navy. These watches averaged around 49mm in diameter.

As the times of WWII faded into memory and the strained peace of the ‘Cold War’ became fact, armed forces budgets and army technology boomed. Watchmakers rose to the call by planning an instrument worthy of going into battle with humankind’s strongest weapon. Those were the wonderful times of the regiment watch, though no particular design house can claim full credit for the steps made in that time.

Cold War-era army watches were much larger than the everyday US citizen navigators before them. Averaging 36mm in diameter, the making of these watches was moved to Switzerland and the Swiss armed forces watch corporations who came to the task with centuries’ old reputations for precision.

Like those before them, these Navigators also featured a matte black dial marked with white Arabic numbers 1-12, and with white indices. The new designs failed to have white numbers at cardinal three, 6, nine, and twelve. Another new addition was a shatterproof Perspex acrylic crystal, which protected its large twelve ligne movement from magnetic fields.

These hand-wound watches were planned to be water-resistant to 20 feet, including water-resistance under low pressure at operational altitudes, and added a naval dimension to the regular army watch.

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