It’s not easy tinkering with an icon. The steel Omega Speedmaster – aka the Moonwatch, as in the one NASA astronauts wore on the Apollo missions – is an epic piece recognizable at ten paces. It belongs in any collection of historic watches. Changes to the look of it have been minimal and made only after much deliberation. All of which makes the 43mm Speedmaster Chronoscope, out now, something of a quantum departure.
The Chrono scope is available in six variations in steel and one in gold, including a panda dial (silver with black subdials), a blue dial, and, most striking of all, an all-silver dial with blue hands. Then there’s the unmissable set of three concentric circles emanating from the centre; this element makes the watch truly compelling.
Put simply, a chronoscope is a graphic measuring device that uses the passing of time to compute all sorts of interesting data. It combines three different tools. A telemeter measures your distance from a given event using the speed of sound. (You see a lightning strike, for instance, and start the chronograph. When you hear thunder, you stop it. The telemeter will show you how far away the bad weather is.) A more standard tachymeter measures speed over a known distance. (You track the time for a one-mile lap in a race, and it shows you the car’s speed.) And a pulsometer tells you your heart rate. (You start the chronometer, count 30 beats, stop it, and check your BPM.)
Back in the ’40s, when not much else could do the math, such functions were crammed into smaller sports watches. Nowadays, you’ve fot more room to house all that utility. Of course, you could probably do all this on your phone, too. But where’s the fun in that?
Find one here.