Chronograph watches are stopwatches by another name. Hit a button on the side and a hand whizzes off around the dial to time anything from Formula One laps to boiling an egg. A more honest reason for the chronograph’s enduring appeal might be the fiddle factor – letting the hand run for a few seconds and then reseting it is oddly satisfying. Why? Who can say?
Chronographs are usually found in the fields of aviation or racing. Nautical chronographs do exist but they’re something of an oddity. Trying to time seconds underwater using a pusher operated wearing thick rubber gloves isn’t ideal. Reading the chrono hand in murky, choppy conditions 200m below might be impossible. That’s why dive watches tend to come with thick rotating marked bezels instead. A better way to check how much oxygen you’ve got left in the tank.
In 1965, with Jacques Cousteau fever at its height, Breitling released the SuperOcean reference 2005. A member of its dive watch family and technically a chronograph, it binned off the second hand, added a high-contrast dial ring and chunky luminescent batons. In place of the traditional chrono hand was a large, luminous central sweep hand that took a whole hour to make a full rotation of the dial. It also featured a tiny circular aperture at 6 o’clock that changed colour when the sweep hand was running. This SuperOcean became known as the “Slow Moving Chronograph” or “Slow Chrono” and has been a genuinely rare find on the secondary market ever since.
Now the chrono hand that moves 60 times slower than normal is back. As you might expect, Breitling has gone to town on options. There’s three different case metals (steel, steel-gold and bronze), four sizes (36mm, 42mm, 44mm and 46mm) two strap options (rubber and three-row metal) and a choice of dial colours. It features the up-to-date Calibre 17 movement you’ll find in its other SuperOceans and is water resistant to 300m. The bezel is unidirectional on all models except the 46mm, where it’s bidirectional and comes with a lock. That ‘dot’ at 6 o’clock is now referenced on the second hand.
The new collection is being promoted by Breitling’s ‘surfer squad’, that includes Kelly Slater, but in keeping with the brand’s keenness not to be restricted to the traditional watch categories of land, sea and air, it notes it would be equally suited to swimming, surfing or hitting the beach bar.“There’s a certain sameness to the look of most dive watches, but the Slow Motion always stood out from the crowd,” says CEO Georges Kern. “We’re so pleased to introduce our modern take on this classic, the all-new SuperOcean.”From £3,650.
Johnny Davis is the Style Director of Esquire. He was previously editor of the influential British magazine The Face.