A Breitling Chrono-Matic Limited Edition In Rose Gold
Take to the skies, in style.
Breitling has been on a real roll for the last few years, since Georges Kern, formerly the head of IWC, became CEO and charted a new course for the company based on looking back in order to look forward. Today we’re going to take a look at a watch from earlier in the 2000s, which in a way anticipates the Kern era at Breitling, in that it takes its design cues from much earlier in Breitling’s history – and has an interesting connection to the birth of the automatic chronograph as well. The subject for AWAW this week is a Breitling Chrono-Matic Navitimer, in a 44mm rose gold case, with a left-hand crown that’s a shout out to the Breitling Chrono-Matic models introduced in 1969 – and to the first, slide rule bezel equipped Navitimers, from the 1950s.
The whole business of putting a slide rule bezel on a watch didn’t start with Breitling but the company received a patent in 1942 for the original Chronomat (Chronograph for Mathematicians) design, which combined a slide rule bezel with a chronograph. The Navitimer (Navigation Timer) slide rule bezel was designed for aerial navigation calculations and can be used to calculate average speed over distance, distance traveled at a given speed, fuel consumption over time, and so on.
As a navigation tool, the Navitimer was preceded by the E-6B circular slide rule, the first version of which was invented in the 1930s by naval aviator Lt. Philip Dalton. Dalton was killed in 1940 in a training accident which also took the life of a student pilot, but his invention, which went through a number of variations before reaching the form it has today, became universally adopted as a navigation tool. “E-6B” is the part number for the final version, and student pilots are still required to learn how to use one, although it has long since been superseded in actual flight operations by satellite navigation.
This particular version of the Chrono-Matic (H2236012/B818) was made as a limited edition in 2005, and it has a 24 hour dial derived from the Breitling Cosmonaute, a modified Navitimer which was designed originally by Breitling for astronaut Scott Carpenter, who wore the watch in 1962 for the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission.
In recent years, Breitling has put greater and greater emphasis on using in-house (or shared) movements, but this watch uses an ETA base caliber with a Dubois-Depraz module. If you are historically minded, though, there is a connection here to the original Chrono-Matic – that watch when it launched in 1969, used the Caliber 11 automatic chronograph movement, which had been developed by a consortium consisting of Heuer, Breitling, Hamilton-Buren, and Dubois Depraz, so there’s some of the original Chronomatic DNA in there. (The watches using the new movement were launched on March 3rd with press conferences in New York and Geneva).
The left hand crown was an instantly recognizable feature of the Caliber 11 series of movements; here the crown is in the same position as the original, as are the chronograph pushers.
At 44mm, it’s a lot of watch (and a lot of gold) although there is again, some historical justification for the size of the watch. One of them is legibility – a watch meant to be quickly and easily read in the cockpit, or during crewed spaceflight operations, is better constructed on the larger side (the Cosmonaute worn by Scott Carpenter came in at 42.5mm in diameter). And, as Jeff Stein of On The Dash noted when Carpenter’s flown Cosmonaute surfaced in 2022, the additional width (the standard Navitimer at the time was 40.5mm in diameter) also meant that the bezel would be easier to turn while wearing gloves. The first crown left, automatic Navitimer from 1969 was a whopping 48mm in diameter so you could say Breitling’s actually toned down the size.
I suppose you could make an argument that gold, inasmuch as it’s highly corrosion resistant, is a practical metal for a utility watch but that would probably be pushing it. A Breitling Chrono-Matic in gold is, like a solid gold Speedmaster, an exercise in making a design icon a luxury design icon, but as we have seen throughout the post-World War II evolution of tool watches, such things have their appeal and everything from solid gold Breitlings to solid gold Rolex to solid gold Omegas to solid gold – well, pretty much everything, have had, and will continue to have, their fans; 1969 may have been the year of the first automatic chronographs (from the Breitling, Hamilton-Buren, Dubois Depraz, and Heuer consortium but also from Zenith and Seiko as well) but it was also the year the first gold Sub came out. If you are wearing a tool watch as an assertion of your mastery of land, sea, or air, you may as well assert your dominance over the world of opulence while you’re at it.
However, as we’ve seen, while the massive gold case exerts an undeniable warmth and richness, there is a lot of history packed into this watch as well. With links to watches and technical watch developments going back to the 1940s, it’s a cool (and luxurious) reminder of the depth and breadth of Breitling’s contributions to modern horology.