A Short Summary Of The History Of Armed Forces Watches
Armed forces watches, as their name suggests, were created for the armed forces. The first army watches were naval pieces, chronometers that worked okay for their purposes, but as other branches of the army – aviation especially – made major technical advances round the time of the second World War, accurate measurement of the seconds became vital.
As the old chestnut goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ and Navigator ( occasionally 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, thus shedding any ‘chronometer error’ and the navigational gaffes that would result.
In World War I seconds continued to be vital in both armed forces technology and military watches. The feature that authorized for synchronization between two timepieces – continued to improve and advance. These watches were worn on the exterior of a flight jacket or on the navigator’s thigh.
The Germans also added antimagnetic protection to their chronometers. Inside another major Axis power, Seiko produced a fantastic 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, military budgets and military technology boomed. Watchmakers rose to the call by planning an instrument deserving of going into battle with humankind’s strongest weapon. Those were the excellent times of the regiment watch, though no definite design house can claim full credit for the steps made in that time.
Cold War-era army watches were much bigger than the everyday US consumer navigators before them. Averaging 36mm in diameter, the development of these watches was moved to Switzerland and the Swiss army watch firms 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 3, 6, 9, and 12. Another new addition was a shatterproof Perspex acrylic crystal, which protected its giant twelve ligne movement from magnetic fields.
These hand-wound watches were predicted to be water-resistant to 20 feet, including water-resistance under low pressure at operational altitudes, and added a naval dimension to the regular military watch.
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