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About
A few years ago, I penned a lighthearted article defending the moral integrity of the Bund strap. It was more so a conglomeration of historical nuggets and shower thoughts than any sort of faux-legalistic essay, but I enjoyed putting it together because the premise stood out stylistically from what I was writing at the time. Today’s spirited caper brings back “In Defense Of” and elevates it into a formal column, with the ante upgraded from total non-issue to materially immaterial. The defendant on trial? The caller GMT.
GMTs are my longstanding favorite watch archetype. A GMT (usually my 16710) lands on my wrist at least five days a week; I find the complication especially useful considering my partner, Sarah, traverses multiple time zones per day on a two-week stint each month. And yet, she’s the one wearing a caller GMT while I am sedentarily mired 24/7 in Pacific Standard Time. If you know the difference between the two types, you might be thinking what I have thought on several occasions – she and I should switch watches.
If you find yourself unsure of the difference, that’s okay. We’ll go through the features and merits of both in detail (keeping in mind there are always exceptions to the norm). Public sentiment will also be a focal point, as there are two schools of thought on the caller GMT. The first voices appreciation for its budget friendliness and convenience at home. Meanwhile, the other is utterly convinced that the caller is a bearer of singular falsity. That isn’t tongue-in-cheek – they really do consider it a “false” GMT. It is the opinion of this author that their position is misguided. The caller GMT doesn’t tell you anything less than a traveler GMT, and until consumer spending proves otherwise, its use case for the positionally stable remains intact.
If you belong to this class of aristocratic GMT elitists, prepare to be talked at. The emotional tide rising within isn’t colossal – think wave pool at Six Flags, not great wave off Kanagawa – but it has grown enough for me to launch today’s militant diatribe on GMTs. In my capacity to educate you, I aspire to be Lord North’s(1) greatest foil: your attitudes are narrow, and so I must broaden your vision. Let’s begin.
Popular (GMT) Mechanics
GMT watches are the classical definition of the aviator’s timepiece. They work by tracking a second time zone via the addition of a 24-hour hand. This fourth hand, usually elongated and shaped with an arrow at the point, completes a full dial rotation every 24 hours. It needs a reference table, however, and so watch manufacturers typically elect to equip their GMT watches with a 24-hour bezel as a complement to the GMT hand. Sometimes that bezel is fixed, whereas other times it can rotate; in the case of the latter, you can actually track three time zones (and even read them all at the same time if there is a second set of 24-hour markings on the dial).
The class name originates from Greenwich Mean Time, that most average of temporal deities sitting atop the Prime Meridian. Today, GMT is merely mortal – it was replaced as the global legally accepted time standard by Coordinated Universal Time (“UTC” or “Zulu”) in 1972. They technically differ in their measurement basis, as GMT is based on observing Helios while UTC harnesses the power of the atomic clock. Given that GMT’s offset to UTC is zero, however, there is no practical impact on everyday life.
The modern GMT watch broadly falls into two categories: the caller (office) and traveler (flyer). These movements are distinguished by which hand has independent jumping capability. Let’s visit Brandt and Breguet, two watchmakers based in Los Angeles, to visualize the difference. Brandt has a caller GMT, while Breguet is equipped with a traveler GMT. For simplicity’s sake, both watches have a rotating 24-hour bezel zeroed at 12 o’clock with their 24-hour hands set to Pacific Standard Time (which makes all four time zones identical to start). For example, at 9AM PST, the 24-hour hand would be pointing at “9” on the bezel. At 1PM PST, the 24-hour hand would be pointing at “13.”
- Breguet is set to travel for business in New York for a week, while Brandt plans to remain in Los Angeles while awaiting the return of his friend. There is a three-hour time difference that they will need to account for after Breguet has landed at his destination.
- After Brandt has dropped Breguet off at LAX at 5PM on a Thursday (the truest test of friendship), he journeys home to the Hollywood Hills. As Brandt sits down to decompress, he takes off his caller GMT. He unscrews the crown to the first position and rotates it three clicks. Brandt’s independent 24-hour hand jumps three hours forward. He is still showing PST with his local hour hand, but EST is now tracked against the bezel.
- Breguet has chosen to land at Newark, given that he needs to save every possible penny to make watches. When he lands, he immediately looks to his traveler GMT, which still has both local time and the secondary time zone set to PST. Like Brandt, he also unscrews and pulls out the crown to the first position before rotating it three clicks. His independent local hour hand correspondingly jumps three hours forward, showing him EST locally while PST is still shown against the bezel.
Note that both men are using a method that would work with either a fixed bezel or a rotating bezel. A second, more refined (albeit not necessarily better) way to tell time using the latter would be for Brandt and Breguet to instead set their 24-hour hands to UTC instead of PST. In this situation, Brandt would rotate his bezel to “19” or UTC-5, giving him the time in New York. Breguet would likely still jump his local hour hand after landing at Newark for convenience, but this time, he would also rotate his bezel to “16” or UTC-8 for Los Angeles. With that extra set of 24-hour markings I alluded to earlier, either man could feasibly read all three time zones at once.
The naming of each style is derived from its theoretical best use case. For pilgrims of all stripes, the traveler GMT’s primacy is undisputed – you land in an exotic location (most likely Newark, New Jersey, you jet-setter, you) and can immediately adjust local time to conveniently assimilate into your new time zone. For friends of said travelers, the caller GMT makes for an attractive helper – you want to keep local time to where you are, so adjusting the 24-hour hand to the secondary time zone is a more expedient solution.
Both GMT types typically have the date tied to local time, but the method for refreshing the date works differently. With a caller, you often have a quickset date and 24-hour hand tied to the first position (meaning you cannot go backwards when setting either function). With a traveler, there is no quickset capability, but jumping the local hour hand two times around the dial will change the date (this is slightly slower than the caller, but still far quicker than a regular three-hand watch with no jumping capability). It is worth noting that some companies, like Omega, do offer time-only watches with independently adjustable local hour hands.
All of this ties into cost and construction. Given how it functions, it feels fair to say that the caller GMT is effectively a modified three-hand movement (which is where the controversy originates from). As such, it is generally both cheaper to manufacture and buy when compared to its more mechanically advanced sibling.
A Matter Of Truth And Manners
There is a significant amount of romantic equity baked into the GMT concept, and it all starts with Rolex’s GMT-Master 6542. The 6542 was originally developed by corporate request from Pan Am Airlines. Launched in 1954, it was the first watch to be equipped with both a 24-hour hand and a rotating 24-hour bezel made from Bakelite. Rolex wasn’t the first or only travel watch in town – Glycine’s Airman and Tissot’s Navigator are also iconic – but these in-period competitors operated differently as 24-hour watches. I’m going to focus on Rolex because the company’s product development curve best informs our discussion.
The 6542 was powered by three different movements over its lifespan in the Calibers 1036, 1065, and 1066. All of these were modified three-hand engines (Rolex’s Caliber 1030 was the base) with a 24-hour hand slaved to the local hour hand. Given the lack of adjustability, the 6542 does not fit the contemporary vision of a GMT watch. In fact, none of the first series GMT-Masters conform to modern expectations because of their fixed hand movements. The 16750 and 16700, which followed the long-enduring 1675, added a quickset date but still couldn’t jump either hand. Consider Brandt and Breguet again from earlier. If either man had been equipped with any of these watches, their experience would have been strictly limited to rotating the bezel for a maximum of two time zones.
When Rolex launched the GMT-Master II 16760 “Fat Lady” and its Caliber 3085 in 1982, they jumped straight to using an independent local hour hand. Rolex’s impact on how we think about GMTs shouldn’t be underestimated. Here, we have a culturally ubiquitous brand at the earliest stages of its luxury transition deciding to focus on what we know today as the more premium style of GMT movement. It gives us food for thought: Is a more complicated GMT the universally better choice? Is there a truer, if not objectively true, GMT movement?
Admittedly, such an idea induces a small amount of mental indigestion for me. I’m not sure where in the primordial muck of the internet that the label “true GMT” arose from (maybe some big-headed horologist on Watchuseek carved it into stone during the early teens), but I know I don’t particularly care for it. I find it silly because professionals were using GMT-Masters with slaved 24-hour hands for nigh on 28 years before the 16760 came out (and likely continued to do so afterwards). Imagine walking up to the owner of an old GMT-Master or another vintage fixed hand travel watch and snootily telling them that they don’t own a true GMT. Personally, I’d call you a gatekeeper (and probably another colorful name for good measure).
Truth is objective. Within the context of our discussion, logic dictates that someone referring to a traveler GMT as “true” must inherently consider a caller to be false. And yet, both GMT types track a second time zone. They both track local time, have a 24-hour hand that does a full rotation around the dial once per day, and typically have a date function tied to local time as well. It doesn’t matter if the caller GMT is an upgraded three-hander or not because the interpretation of time is demonstrably the same.
In the same way that the two GMT formats share benefits, they equitably share limitations. Obviously, a rotating bezel is always required to track three time zones; which hand acts independently is irrelevant. What I personally find more interesting is that neither type can completely tackle the full global array of time zones.
Despite what modern Rolex and the Big 24-Click Bezel Lobby might tell you, there are, in fact, more than 24 time zones (which is the number based on standard one-hour increments). The real number is in the 40 context, and it includes time zones where the offset to UTC can be 15, 30, or 45 minutes. You might be inclined to write these intermediate zones off as insignificant, but you do so at your own peril. India is the most populous nation in the world, with over 1.4 billion people, and it exists at UTC+5:30.
It appears we have found a near-universal issue, an ailment that both caller and traveler GMT readily suffer from: they cannot jump their independent hands inside one-hour increments, thus lacking the ability to track intermediate time zones. Would a true GMT not be capable of covering intermediate UTC offsets? It should, in my opinion. Would anyone argue the modern Rolex GMT-Master II with its 24-click bezel and traveler movement is a fake GMT? No, probably not.
I’m keen to invoke a comparison to drive home why the true label feels unfair: calendar watches. The perpetual calendar debuted in pocket watch format in 1762 via Thomas Mudge, then appeared in wristwatch form courtesy of Patek Philippe in 1925. The annual calendar is a newborn by comparison, with Patek having only invented it in 1996 as a more accessible complication for collectors. Q.P.s have more horsepower than annuals; they self-adjust for both February and leap years, and only need to be tuned once per century. Meanwhile, annual calendars automatically cover 30-day months and must be adjusted once per year at the end of February.
Perpetual calendars and annual calendars exist on a different plane of horological complexity and luxuriousness than GMTs, but the situation isn’t dissimilar. Here, we have two more watches with the same directive. The GMT watches are both focused on providing multiple time zones, while the calendar watches are both focused on providing a complete orientation of time via the day, date, and month. The caller GMT and annual calendar both arrived second, are the mechanically lesser watches in their respective tandems, aim to enhance accessibility via cost reduction, and theoretically produce the same visual result (and that’s giving a smidgen of leeway to annuals around leap year coverage). Despite all this, no one seems to call the annual calendar a “false” calendar watch.
Here’s my punchline without ever leaving the realm of functionality: the “true” label is erroneous. Mechanical complexity is not one-for-one with efficacy, and it is a poor barometer for ascertaining the legitimacy of a tool.
If The Price Is Right
If mechanical makeup can’t lead us to more honest waters, maybe the price narrative is the missing piece. The caller GMT’s big draw has always been affordability, which evidently cuts both ways. Some enthusiasts see the lower pricing as evidence that watch companies are selling you an imitation of the real deal. I understand the cynicism – agnostic of industry, corporations have an inglorious history of cutting corners – but I think I would understand it a little more if the caller GMT reached a lesser time-telling result.
What would it take to firm up the pricing variable as a coffin nail for the caller GMT? Well, the existence of a competitor traveler movement that requires lower economics could theoretically make consumers ignore the use case of the caller GMT in favor of higher technical prowess. And with enough runway to gather data around sales and product offerings, you could eventually make the case in the future that consumers were actively voting the caller GMT into extinction. I would be hard-pressed to argue with shifting consumer preference on such a wide scale.
This is likely where we turn the page to Miyota’s hypothetical silver bullet, the 2022-vintage 9075 traveler GMT movement. The 9075 is an automatic, hacking caliber with 42 hours of power reserve that hums at 28,800 bph and is accurate to -10 / +30 seconds per day. Miyota calls this and the rest of their 9-series engines “premium movements.” I question the integrity of yet another label – 28,800 bph feels pretty standard in this era, and the out-of-the-box accuracy is anything but premium – but I don’t question the market benefit. The existence of open-source traveler hardware outside the clutches of Swiss mandarins is most certainly a boon to microbrands and small independents.
Up until now, the options for small watch companies have been largely defined by caller movements – think Seiko NH34(A) and Sellita SW330, for example. These calibers are a good juxtaposition, respectively costing on average $70-$90 and $300-$375 (insane for the NH34, I know). The cost of the Miyota 9075? $150-$200. It may not be quite the same grade of construction as the SW330, but the 9075 slots in nicely as a mid-range quality alternative with a different look to the movement architecture.
Is the Miyota 9075 really the miracle cure to save consumers from caller GMT infirmity? Well, Miyota certainly wants you to think so – both their website and a Miyota-sponsored post at ABTW are very upfront in stating the “truth” of the 9075. Keeping in mind that this is entirely within Miyota’s right to do so and that I can no more outlaw the “true” label than I can use a moonphase to control the tides, authoritatively peanut buttering the term over both pages without referencing traveler or flyer as commonly accepted terminology feels like bad advertising.
Independent of Miyota’s marketing language and the fact that aesthetics often act as a trump card, a traveler GMT entrenched in caller GMT pricing territory is a worthy enough reason to run the calculus on engineering versus convenience. Recognizing I haven’t gone and polled a sample of watch enthusiasts, I’m willing to wager that there is more than one person out there who will still go caller. That person, admittedly less focused on luxury and positionally stable most of the time, may prefer the marginal utility of the caller while being willing to accept the price relativity as it is. The amount of sense it makes for them to grab a caller GMT off the desk doesn’t change whether the wallet-friendly Miyota 9075 exists or not.
All of this discussion on the meaning of price (life) has me altering the prompt to ponder a different question: instead of a true GMT, is there such a thing as an ideal modern GMT?
Admittedly, that’s a tough ask; tweaking the prompt this way adds subjectivity that I believe with conviction wasn’t present before. However, theoreticals provide a lot of the fun when it comes to watches. It would be quite audacious of me not to provide my preferred formula after pontificating on GMTs for so long (and I’d like to give it a go regardless). Here’s the theoretical Count Sunny Hours recipe for an ideal modern GMT watch.
- Element 1A: The watch should have an independent GMT hand or an independent local hour hand. Either movement is acceptable; as I alluded to earlier, my daily watch is a traveler, but I have admitted a caller likely suits my lifestyle more appropriately. You’ll have to take my word for it that I am actively considering adding a Caller GMT to the stable.
- Element 1B: The independent hand should be able to traverse in 15-minute increments to fully cover intermediate time zones. I currently know of one watch that does this – the Gavox Aurora, which utilizes a pusher setup. If you know of more, please message me, as I’m curious to find others like it.
- Element 2A: The watch should have a rotating 24-hour bezel. Table stakes requirement, as this enables the tracking of a third time zone. Two-tone or monochrome coloration is acceptable.
- Element 2B: The bezel should have detailed graduation. Three ticks or hash marks should be placed between each numeral and intermediate dot marker to account for time zones with 15, 30, and 45-minute offsets.
- Element 2C: The bezel should be friction-based, aka no click spring. That’s one of my hotter takes, I know. But a friction bezel gives you the most granularity for tackling that pesky trio of offsets (and you never need to worry about factory misalignment ever again). I have debated taking the click spring out of my Pepsi bezel several times… and I’m getting closer after writing this.
- Element 3: The dial should have a second set of 24-hour markings with the same level of graduation as the bezel to make reading three time zones concurrent, not sequential.
- Element 4: The dial should have a date window. Date capability is usually encapsulated in the scope of both movements, and I think travelers (or their friends) have a vested interest in being able to quickly orient themselves around a travel itinerary. On a personal level, the idea of a travel watch without a date is a bit confusing to me. I adore you, Nomos, but we are destined to remain forlorn lovers.
It goes without saying, but the creation of this watch assumes workable economics can be harvested by a corporation willing to invest the money to design and manufacture it. Watches need to be commercially reasonable enterprises; unfortunately or not, I would be very surprised if anyone thought friction bezels or gratuitous graduation markings were about to be in vogue again. Don’t even get me started on the market for this watch, which would definitely not be comprised of casual buyers – if anything, only a specific group of enthusiasts with me as their cult leader would be pining for it. Until the day comes that such a watch is created (or I discover its existence), I am content to operate with the tools already at my disposal.
Court Adjourned
21 minutes and 4,000 words later feels like a very appropriate point to remind us all that this debate is largely rendered inert by the existence of the rotating bezel. Never mind the fact that the GMT is pointless in this age of the atomic clock – it’s simply faster to let your handheld computer tell you the time zone you need by searching for the city you are in. But maybe there’s something to be said that that doesn’t matter either – the crowd reading this article is the definition of self-selecting. If you made it this far, you’re either curious, offended, or a little bit of both.
Regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, I think we can all agree that the best GMT is the one you have on your wrist. It may not be the truest one – there’s no such thing, and I stand by that – but it’ll get the job done in a way that all the other GMTs can’t. I think we can also all agree that it’s good to discuss and push back on ideas in the spirit of cultivating a richer conversation around our hobby. If you have thoughts on the caller GMT, “true” GMTs, or your ideal watch, please let me know what you think in the comments. Cheers, all.
(1) Source: Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming. In the context of watches, Lord North is the equivalent of an authorized dealer who is incapable of being honest with you. Avoid Lord North.
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