Timothy Barber traces the evolution of the pilot’s watch
When he landed his Type XI monoplane near Dover Castle on July 25, 1909, Louis Blériot had been airborne for 36 minutes and 30 seconds. In that time, he had earned himself £1,000 (roughly £110,000 today) by becoming the first man to fly across the English Channel. What history does not record, however, is whether he had the presence of mind to perform that act now familiar to every UK traveller on landing: did he adjust his wristwatch back by an hour?
It may be a fatuous question, but what we do know is that he was wearing one – a watch made especially for aviators by Swiss company Zenith. Its look – large white numbers against a black dial, designed to be easily legible at a glance, even in low light – still defines the modern pilot’s watch. Thanks to Blériot’s antics, Zenith was able to trademark the word “pilot” on a dial, something that remains its exclusive right.
The history of aviation and wristwatches are, in fact, so closely entwined as to be almost indivisible. Arriving at the same time, if they didn’t each make the other possible, they made their success far more likely. After all, the first recorded watch designed for the wrist (as opposed to a pocket watch attached to a strap) was made for a pilot, only a year after the Wright Brothers flew.
In 1904, pioneering Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont wanted a watch that could be easily checked while manning the controls, which ruled out pocket devices. His friend Louis Cartier obliged, producing a square timepiece with a case that integrated lugs to attach it to a leather strap. By 1911, Cartier was marketing the “Santos”, and it remains central to the grande maison’s watch offering today.
Timing was essential to navigation, and as aviation developed, so too did the wristwatch as an accoutrement of the aviator. Looking for new customers in the hard economic times of the mid-1930s, the Schaffhausen-based International Watch Company (now known as IWC) developed a sophisticated model that it called the Special Watch for Pilots. Along with the familiar black dial and white numerals, it was sturdy, resistant to magnetic interference from cockpit instruments and used a special oil to prevent freezing.
It was a commercial failure – but when war came, IWC found itself with the fortuitous expertise to supply gargantuan, highly specified watches to the Luftwaffe’s bomber navigators. A spot of karmic rebalancing presented itself immediately after in the form of a juicy contract from the RAF to provide a robust service watch for its pilots. Known as the Mark XI, it has arguably come to be seen as the definitive pilot’s watch, and remained in RAF service for three decades.
IWC has built an entire collection around the dual mythology of its Luftwaffe “Big Pilot’s” watch and the RAF watch. The latter has evolved multiple times, from the Mark XI to today’s Mark XVIII, unveiled in January. It’s everything a pilot’s watch should be: clear, sober, streamlined and, in its crisp black-and-white face, starkly handsome (there’s a special-edition midnight blue dial version, too).
The busy yin to the Mark XI’s militaristic yang would be a watch developed contemporaneously by Breitling – the Navitimer. A chronograph with a rotating bezel that acted as a complex circular slide rule for navigational calculations, its charismatic design has remained unchanged since it was invented – the difference is what was then a useful computational tool worn on the wrist is nowadays just for show – I’ve never met a pilot who understands how to calculate anything with it, or feels the need.
Still, should they, Breitling has just changed the game by bringing out a connected smartwatch. The Exospace B55 pairs with your phone to log and analyse flight data and manage time-zone changes. If Cartier created the Santos watch to free up the pilot’s hands for flying, then in the smartwatch age, you need your hands to handle your phone to help manage the functions on your aviation watch. Blériot and Santos Dumont would no doubt be confused.
Timothy Barber is editor of QP magazine.
