Normal Watch | 6 Time Zones | 1895 | Steel
Series: GRAND COMPLICATIONS
By: Sílvio Pereira
Technical data
- Pocket watch, Lepine type. 6 time zones. Dated 1895
- Functions: hours and minutes in six time zones, and seconds.
- Serial number: none
- Manufacture: The Normal Watch
- Country - Switzerland
- Calibre: classic bridge layout. Unnumbered
- Movement protection: steel dust cover.
- Escapement type: Swiss lever
- Balance: bimetallic, temperature-compensated, with flat hairspring
- Power reserve: 36 hours
- Frequency: 18,000 vph
- Jewels: 15
- Case material: steel.
- Dial: enamel, with a small flaw at 7 o'clock
- London time at the centre
- Johannesburg time at 12 o'clock
- Bombay time at 2 o'clock
- Sydney time at 4 o'clock
- Shanghai time at 8 o'clock
- Calcutta time at 10 o'clock
- Small seconds: at 6 o'clock
- Case diameter: 52.2mm
- Thickness: 19.5mm
- Weight: 115.06g
- The mainspring is wound via the crown at 12 o'clock.
- Hands: pear-shaped hours and minutes. Set via the crown, with a push-piece releasing the stem at 1 o'clock.
- Numerals: Roman. Minute markers on all the dials.
- Seconds: Arabic numerals for the five-second intervals and indices for the rest.
- Crystal: in excellent condition.
- Case back numbering: none
General assessment - A watch with six time zones, very rare, in a very good state of preservation.
Maker
Watch marked on the dial Deposé 4975, corresponding to the Swiss patent of A.SANDOZ-BOUCHERIN, and made by the NORMAL WATCH Co. (ACHILLE HIRSCH) of La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland).
History of World Time Watches
Invented in the 1930s, long before the proliferation of commercial jet travel, World Time watches captured the imagination of their admirers with their dial, displaying real time in key cities across all 24 of the planet's time zones. From exotic locations such as Rio de Janeiro and Tahiti, the Geneva watchmaking genius Louis Cottier made it possible not only to show the time in many far-off places, but also to evoke events and adventures in travel.
Patek Philippe Ref. 2535 by Louis Cottier, the model on which Svend Anderson based the design of his Worldtimer watches.
However, as far as World Time watches are concerned, and for all the wanderlust they whetted, the dials of these watches carried the many geopolitical realities of the periods during which specific references of the watch were launched. Indeed, if one truly appreciates provenance, it becomes all the more important to at least gather the history and the events that shaped the birth of these watches.
A history of World Time watches
Born in Geneva in 1894, Louis Cottier was often mesmerised by the many clocks and automata his father built, among them a World Time System in 1885. Culturally or technologically speaking, before 1885 there was really no good reason to standardise time around the world.
Louis Cottier
Humanity had neither the need nor the ability to travel the vast distances that made inconsistent time standards between cities relevant, until a Chief Engineer of the Canadian Railway spent an uncomfortable night in an Irish railway station in 1876.
The Vacheron Constantin Ref 3372 – note how Singapore is spelt Singapour, and how Tokyo is spelt Tokio; a reflection of the era.
The engineer in question, Sanford Fleming, wondered not only at the illogic of it all, but also at the many times he had to adjust his watch to suit each city's time standard, which had already made him miss several carriage rides. In the end, missing the train was the last straw. Had he not missed his train on that occasion, he might never have put forward a proposal for making a watch with several time zones, and Emmanuel Cottier might never have seen fit to propose a world time system to the Société des Arts. Just imagine: we were one missed train journey away from never knowing Louis Cottier's gift in this field of watchmaking – World Time watches.
Although his father's World Time System was not a success, it gave the young Cottier the inspiration for the complication he would invent in 1931. Louis Cottier was talented (he won two notable prizes from Patek Philippe while still an apprentice watchmaker, and served as a watchmaker at Jaeger's Geneva branch after graduating). A small-scale watchmaker working from a small office in his wife's stationery shop on Rue Vautier in Carouge, it was there, among the many table clocks, pocket watches and wristwatches, that he finally invented the complication that would lead to World Time watches.
Cottier succeeded where earlier attempts had failed with cramped dials and barely legible cities; his design was ingeniously simple, and his "heures universelles" or "world time" watches showed local time with the hour hand at the centre and the minutes on a static central dial. Cottier then linked the hour hand to a rotating inner ring so that, as the hour hand turned over 12 hours, the inner ring would run anticlockwise over 24 hours. The adjustable outer ring carried 24 major cities (London, New York, Moscow, etc.) corresponding to 24 time zones; the local city was turned to 12 o'clock and local time was then set on the central hands. Once the user had aligned the local time with the 12 o'clock position of the local dial, the watch and its corresponding outer ring would correctly display the hours and minutes, night or day, simultaneously – all on a single dial.
His brilliance was recognised by prestigious Geneva brands such as Patek Philippe, Rolex, Vacheron Constantin and Agassiz (known today as Longines), as he became a specialist supplier of World Time watches to each of these famous brands.
Left: Patek Philippe Ref. 515 HU, the first world timer watch. Right: the Patek Philippe Ref. 96 HU, a World Time in a Calatrava case.
A year after the debut of the World Time complication, Vacheron Constantin commissioned him in 1932 to build the Ref. 3372, with two further references (Ref. 3650 and Ref. 3638) following in 1936. As wristwatches began to overtake pocket watches in popularity, Patek Philippe also approached Cottier to produce the first World Time wristwatch in 1937. The rectangular Patek Philippe Ref. 515 HU can be considered the first World Time produced by Patek, and the Ref. 96 HU was the first to be housed in a Calatrava case; it lacked the Patek Philippe signature on the dial. However, archive documents showing that only four Ref. 515 HU were ever produced have led to speculation that they never went on commercial sale. That said, producing 4 prototypes of a new complication is not the sort of thing early 20th-century watchmakers commonly indulged in, but this may be no more than speculation.
It should be noted that the Ref. 515 was also the first time Cottier modified his design by printing the cities directly on the rectangular dial – while this adjustment made the cities more legible (and protected), it made the local time permanent. The Calatrava Ref. 96 HU, however, saw the return of the far more functional inner dial design.
World Time watches shaped by World History
When it comes to geopolitical change, war is its greatest driver. From 1940, just as in 1914-1918, German time was imposed on the territories occupied by that country, and in some of them it still prevails today under the name of Central European Time, while London kept its place as the world's prime meridian. Likewise, in the Japanese-occupied territories, time zones were also changed. That said, today it is 400 precision caesium atomic clocks that provide Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, the acronym that replaced GMT.
Patek Philippe Ref 1415
The Ref 1415, introduced in 1939, carried the names of three crucial cities representing Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – London, Paris and Algiers – while the GMT +1 time zone featured Oslo, Geneva and Rome. The following Ref 1416, from the same year, kept London and Paris for GMT but showed Berlin and Cape Town for GMT +1. In fact, before the Second World War, Paris and London shared the same time zone – which was logical given that solar time in Paris, to the east, is only nine minutes ahead of the Greenwich meridian; that said, France had resisted the idea until 1911, well after the meridian of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich had been made the reference point for zero degrees longitude.
In essence, these World Time watches became horological time capsules of the era in which they were made, each marking that reflects different cities (and their associated time zones) changing to mirror the political climate. Under German occupation, France moved to Central European Time, and it was assumed that it would later move back, so Patek Philippe went on placing London and Paris in the same time zone until the 1970s, making these watches highly collectable.
Watching World Time watches and their dials evolve with each new model gives us a literal reference point for the milestones of world history, as each dial reflects a geopolitical reality of the period in which the watch was launched. Ever since time zones were created, state actors have altered them for a variety of political or economic reasons, and watch dials often reflected these changes. That said, the World Time watches that most captured the imagination of many enthusiasts were those made by Longines (then known as Agassiz) for the leaders of the Allied Powers, in celebration of Victory in Europe Day ("VE Day", 8 May 1945) and commissioned by a group of prominent citizens, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin and Charles De Gaulle, to commemorate victory in Europe.
Longines, then called Agassiz, produced World Time watches commemorating victory in Europe after the Nazis surrendered to the Allied powers. This one went to Winston Churchill. (front and back)
It is interesting to note that while the cloisonné enamel work of the English hero St. George on the dial side is quite exquisitely done, the engraving of the world map leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, it still reflects the period.
World Time watches today
The fascination with world time watches has not waned, even after the advent of widely available commercial air travel became a reality, replacing imagination and daydreams. Decades later, Cottier's mechanical principle remains relatively unchanged, with city names circling the periphery of the dial above an inner 24-hour ring that turns anticlockwise. The movement of the ring simultaneously coordinates the times in all the time zones, while the hands indicate the time of the place whose name is displayed at 12 o'clock, or local time.
In 1953, Louis Cottier made an important improvement to his invention – the ability to adjust the city disc by means of a secondary crown, which then allowed Patek Philippe to patent a system in 1958 in which the hour hand could be moved without affecting the regular progress of the minute hand. The improvements continued until 1999, when the crown was eventually replaced by a pusher carrying out the adjustments of three functions – city disc, 24-hour ring and hour hand.
The Patek Philippe Ref 2523 has a secondary crown that allows independent adjustment of the city ring. An improvement invented by Cottier.
Patek Philippe entrusted him with the development and manufacture of the greatest number of complicated watches, resulting in the invention and production of the celebrated "Dual time" wristwatch in 1954, with a single movement. This solved the problem of synchronising the minutes, a problem that existed in the double-movement watches of other makers. This Two Time Zone movement with two or three hands, developed in collaboration with Patek Philippe's specialists, is among his most successful inventions. Completed in 1957, the prototype was patented by the company in 1959 (No. 340191).
Cottier would certainly have been surprised to learn that, after his death in 1966, his workshop was given to the Musée d'Horlogerie et d'Emaillerie in Geneva, where it can still be seen today. Similar tributes were paid in his home town of Carouge, where a municipality was renamed after him. And even if those tributes did not exist, Louis Cottier's classic design is still the standard architecture for World Time watches.
Note: The author decided to keep the designation "World Time" in its original terminology, since the translation into Portuguese was not the most suitable and could mislead readers.
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