Elite Traveler March-April 2015

elite traveler MAR/APR 2015 ISSUE 2 117

weathered an even more dramatic drop unscathed. A couple years ago, Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner wore its El Primero Stratos Flyback Striking 10th Chronograph as he became the first man to break the sound barrier without a vehicle, when he skydived from 127,852 feet, reaching a speed of 843 mph. The watch can thus validly be considered to be the fastest watch in the world. While exploits like Baumgartner’s add theatrics and a compelling story to the watchmaking process, many experts on timepieces assert machines that have been specifically designed for the task – are more exact than these colorful road tests. “Smaller companies often resort to gimmicks, where they shoot a watch out of an airplane or drop it from a helicopter,” explains Ben Clymer, co-founder of Hodinkee, one of America’s that traditional tests – done in a conventional laboratory, using

aviation since creating cockpit chronographs in the 1930s, also uses a hybrid mix of tests for its adventure watches, which are worn by the Swiss Air Force. As vice president Jean Paul Girardin explains: “We do laboratory testing, numeric testing with computers to simulate certain functions and a lot of field tests. Everybody wears the new watches from office people to gardeners to skydivers and windsurfers – we get feedback from all of them. “It’s important to have this information alongside the laboratory testing to find out how we can improve in terms of functionality.” Although Breitling doesn’t use ejection seats in its testing, it has found that its watches fare well if pilots do need to use that extreme emergency exit. “In all the cases, if the pilots were wearing our watches, we found the watch far more resistant than the human body,” says Girardin. “The pilot was hurt, but the watch was still functioning.” One of Zenith’s watches has

pre-eminent watch websites. “That’s all well and good, but those are not really meaningful tests. I don’t think that they reach the level of the truly efficient testing that Rolex or Omega have been doing for the last half century. Rolex puts its watches on a shaker that essentially rattles the watch around for weeks at a time. Prolonged, scientific tests are what is really going to prove that a watch can last, not dropping it out of a plane.” Rolex, indeed, runs each of its waterproof and diving watches

The hyperbaric testing unit developed by Comex for Rolex

Photos: Corbis, Trunk Archive