People on trips, especially pilots, value watches that show both the local time and the time at home. The Breitling brand, with its close association with aviation, offers several, from the classic Navitimer World to the racy Chronomat GMT to the technically clever Transocean Chronograph Unitime.
Just prior to landing, say after a trans-Atlantic flight, the fumbling begins: hectic turning of the crown to set the new local time on one’s watch. But then, what time is it at home? Is it too late to call? The owner of a GMT watch can answer such questions easily and with a smile, after all he is master of two or more zone times.
Yes, they are called zone times and not time zones. The latter term describes a geographical area that has a common time of day and a common date. The story behind it: in the mid-1900s, the growth of ship and rail traffic required a coordination of times, which often differed by several minutes from place to place. After protracted international negotiations, in 1884, an agreement was reached at the Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., to divide the earth into 24 times zones, each with 15 degrees of longitude. The zero meridian was defined as the degree of longitude passing through the English city of Greenwich. Instead of GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time, which was used until the 1970s, today we use UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated, which is also the international standard for aviation. The time in Germany is therefore UTC + 1 (plus one hour), and UTC + 2 in the summer. Nowadays local time is not just determined by degree of longitude, but by political considerations as well. China, which, because of its vast east-west domain, should have five time zones, actually has just one, the local time in Beijing. And many nations, such as India (UTC + 5.30 hours), even use half-hour increments. The majority of nations, however, limit themselves to increments of an hour. Breitling chronographs are helpful in this respect, as they can all indicate a second zone time while having significant differences functionally. The Breitling Chronomat GMT is equipped with the manufacturer Caliber B04.
