Attendees at SIHH 2014 agreed that Montblanc knocked it out of the park, and the two TimeWalker World Time Hemispheres models were among the brand’s highlights. Why are there two of them? Because our planet has two hemispheres. Here’s how it works.
Like a traditional world-time watch, the hour and minute hands display the owner’s local time, and a flange with the names of 24 major cities surrounds the dial. This is where things start to get a little non-traditional. One of the watches covers the Northern Hemisphere, and the other the Southern. The outer flanges on each watch list only major cities in the hemisphere that watch covers. The watch shown below is the “North” version.
The flange with the city names does not rotate – it is fixed in place so the city names line up with the locations of the cities on the maps that adorn the dials. Each map shows the appropriate hemisphere with the geographic North or South Pole at the center. The map is interrupted by a ring that sits beneath the dial marked with the hours from 1 to 24. Turning the crown rotates the ring to display the time in each of the 24 time zones. Now for another trick: the 24-hour ring follows the direction of the Earth’s rotation, so on the Northern Hemisphere watch it rotates clockwise, while the Southern Hemisphere version rotates counter-clockwise. That means each version requires its own unique movement.
What if you frequently travel between hemispheres? All is not lost. Each watch contains a map of the opposite hemisphere, with its city names, engraved on the caseback.
It’s all a bit mind-bending at first, but it makes for a great looking and distinctive world-time watch. Or, should that be “half-world-time”?
The “North” version, shown below, is priced at $5,000.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to figure out where Yakutsk is.
* This article was originally published in 2014; prices are subject to change.
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