The Vacheron Constantin Patrimony Traditionelle World Timer 86060, With All 37 Time Zones
You’ve got the whole world on your wrist.
There are several different ways to show the time in different locations around the world. The most basic multi-time zone watch is the so-called GMT complication, which shows the time in two time zones simultaneously (three, if you’ve got a rotating bezel). Then, there are watches that show the time in several cities simultaneously. These are relatively rare because picking cities means leaving others out, which, given the nature of home-team loyalty, may limit the audience for the watch. Finally, there are world-time watches. These show the time in 24 time zones around the world simultaneously.
Louis Cottier, The Man Who Gave Us The World
There are several different systems but they all rely on some variation of the original world time system developed by Louis Cottier in the 1930s and which was adopted by Vacheron Constantin, Patek Philippe, and others.
This type of world timer has a central display for the hours and minutes in your local time zone. Surrounding the central part of the dial is a 24 hour ring which rotates when the watch is running, and outside that, a ring with the names of cities in different time zones. To set the watch, you usually use a pusher to rotate the city ring until your home city is at the top of the dial, and then set the hands to local time. The hands will then show local time, and the time in all 24 time zones can be read by seeing which hour on the 24 hour ring is adjacent to the city in question.
It’s a simple system and it almost takes longer to explain it than it does to use it. The only problem is that there are more than 24 time zones in the world – a lot more; 37 in all. And unlike complications based on natural phenomena, like the moonphase, time zones are entirely artificial. That means that if a country, province, or even individual municipality wants to go off the reservation and change its time zone, there is nothing to stop them. Time zones have changed many times over the last hundred years for political reasons – in 1956, for instance, Nepal changed its offset from GMT to GMT +5.45, in order, according to the Chicago Tribune, to “mark the time the Sun passes over a famous mountain” and there are many other examples.
There is something seemingly natural about 24 time zones – a false appearance, since civil mean time with a 24 hour day is just as arbitrary an invention as time zones – but the upshot is that the world is a crazy-quilt of different time zones which can change on the whim of a government or a despot, which is why most world-time watches rather philosophically just show the 24 full hour offsets from GMT and leave it at that.
Making The World Timer Complete
However, watchmakers strive for completeness, and in 2011 Vacheron Constantin set the horological world on its ear with the debut of the Patrimony Traditionelle World Timer. This watch incorporates all 37 time zones and while this means greater mechanical complexity, the system is as simple to use as you could wish. There’s no pusher; everything is set from the crown, which has two positions.
To set the watch, you pull the crown out to the first position and set the home time city at the bottom of the dial (there is a small pointer to aid you in lining it up). Then you pull out the crown to its second position and set the local time. If you change cities, the hour hand will move the correct number of minutes to show the new local time and, not just the hour hand – the minute hand will jump ahead or behind the appropriate number of minutes as well (to see the complication in action check out Tim Mosso’s video review).
The watch has a slightly larger case, at 42.5mm but the extra real estate is put to good use by the number of cities on the city ring. This is not, by the way, Vacheron’s first rodeo when it comes to multi-city time zone watches – its first 24 hour world timer, a pocket watch made to the Cottier system, was the reference 3372 from 1932, and its first watch to show more than 24 time cities was the reference 3650, which showed 31 reference cities. Vacheron would go on to outdo itself again in 1946, with the reference 4414, which had 41 cities, and if you want to see what such a watch would have looked like on the inside in the 1940s, there is a great article showing disassembly of a reference 4414 over at The Naked Watchmaker.
The first version of the Cottier system didn’t have a pusher – instead, you had to change the cities on a rotating bezel and then re-set local time manually with the crown. The pusher system, which advanced the city ring and the hour hand simultaneously, didn’t appear until 2000, in the Patek 5110.
To the best of my knowledge, the first world time wristwatch using the pusher system, and which also showed all 37 time zones, was the one we’ve got right here. The cities in time zones with non-hour offsets from GMT are shown in red, and in the center is a Lambert map projection of the Earth, overlaid with a rotating sapphire disk that acts as a day-night indication. For more technical info, check out our earlier article on this reference, right here.
Every world time watch is a snapshot of the era in which it was made and as time goes by, timezones will change and the reference 86060/000R-9640 Patrimony Traditionelle World Timer will begin to reflect the past as well as the present. For me, though, that’s part of the charm. It’s an ingenious, beautiful and important piece of horological history and the fact that it is almost unknown to a new generation of collectors is icing on the cake.