Since 1955, ‘GMT’ has been an iconic Rolex zero-hours launchpad across 24 time zones… and beyond
The same year that Rolex, Geneva’s pre-eminent watchmaker, officially partnered with Pan American World Airways, NASA was embarking on an experimental programme with the US Air Force, the Navy and North American Aviation. Between 1959 and 1968, 199 hypersonic flights were undertaken by three rocket-powered X-15s, with the goal of testing human ability to withstand the effects of extreme velocity and pressures and temperatures in suborbital conditions. The elite test pilots were drop-launched from the wing of a B-52 bomber at the edge of space, reaching unofficial speed and altitude records of Mach 6.7 (4,520mph) and 354,200ft.
In October 1967, Colonel William J Knight set the still-unbroken speed record of Mach 6.7 while flying his X-15 over the Mojave Desert. Strapped around his silver spacesuit? His very own Rolex GMT-Master. Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s, the same watch ticked beneath the gold-brocade cuffs of Pan Am’s long-haul Boeing 707 and DC-8 captains.
In 1972, 13 years after the X-15 programme began, a total of 12 men had walked on the surface of the Moon. Bringing home the last two of them on 17th December that year was Captain Ronald Evans, who conducted a spacewalk lasting over an hour during the return journey. This marked the final mission of NASA’s Apollo programme, Apollo 17. On his wrist? A Rolex GMT-Master. You get the idea.
In short, Rolex’s groundbreaking – or should that be skyscraping? – traveller’s wristwatch has been the go-to for ‘the best of the best’. Even Jack Swigert relied on his GMT-Master throughout the stricken Apollo 13 mission, only briefly switching to Commander Lovell’s NASA-issued Omega Speedmaster when he needed a stopwatch to time a thruster burn for re-entry.
Since 1955, when time-zone-hopping jet travel blasted passengers to new continents in the space of hours (and Rolex’s boffins into keeping their track of time back home as well as away) their sector-defining cocktail of wrist gadgetry was so on-target that it has barely evolved since. The Rolex GMT-Master, for instance, has remained virtually unchanged due to its precision. The waterproof Oyster crown is unscrewed, then carefully pulled out to one of three positions to adjust the main hours hand in hourly jumps to local time, while the fixed GMT 24-hours hand points to the time back home, read from the day/night colour-coded bezel. A separate crown position allows for fine-tuning both hours and the minutes hands with the movement paused, plus adjusting the date, should you find yourself beyond the International Dateline somewhere over the Pacific.
Weary businessmen of the 60s rejoiced accordingly, having suddenly found themselves being thrust hither and thither to board meetings around the globe. That guilt-ridden bedtime call to the kids back home need never again jangle one’s wife awake at 3am.
If you’re feeling particularly peripatetic, you can also use the bezel as a third hours indication. As long as you’re confident about your ability to remember what the second 24-hours hand would be pointing at once you’ve twizzled the ring off zero to align with the local hours hand according to another time-zone.
Confused? You won’t be – because Rolex are notoriously good (AKA glacially iterative) at getting things just right. In the 80s, Rolex introduced the GMT-Master II – the ‘II’ suffix denoting the new functional update: the ability to adjust the hour hand independently of the GMT hand, allowing for easy time zone changes.
It was the ref 6202 Turn-O-Graph of 1953 that almost nonchalantly coined the enduring tropes of Rolex’s modern-era sports watches, adding to the brand’s screwed-down Oyster case of 1926 a broad rotating timing bezel plus a screw-down crown, ensuring 100m water proofness as well as bold luminous numerals. It’s easy to see how James Bond’s go-to Submariner diving watch tumbled out of this the following year. But it’s especially impressive that, just another year later, Rolex thought to adopt and adapt the dive-time bezel as the defining feature for its new GMT-Master.
On the original GMT-Master, the conventional hours hand, the minutes hand and the 24-hours hand were synchronised; you had pull the crown out to the second position and rotate the hours and minutes hands to set the date and the 24 hours hand, then pull the crown out to the third and final position to set the local hours hand. But now, with the GMT-Master II, in the third position you set the GMT hours and minutes, then push the crown to the second position to set the local hours and date – a far easier and more intuitive mode of operation.
Modern progress has been more about the mighty Crown and its restless honing of the mechanics driving proceedings, rather than the original, revolutionary travel-time system itself. That and the durability of its outward-facing materials. Originally in plexiglass, then harder-wearing anodised aluminium, the GMT-Master’s famed 24-hour rotating bezel and its dual-colour denomination of day and night has been in proprietary ‘Cerachrom’ since 2013, fusing a seemingly endless rainbow of ceramics via a closely guarded alchemy at its Biel/Bienne laboratories.
What you see here is 2024’s latest combo, in never-before-seen black and grey. Look closer-up and, much like the blue and black of 2013 or brown and black of 2018, it boasts two perfectly crisp colour interfaces. This is despite its one-piece ‘monobloc’ design and the contrasting physical properties of each silicate substrate, which are fused together at extreme temperatures to achieve near-total scratch resistance.
We’re talking about the most cult of Switzerland’s brands here, in an already cultish world. So it’s no surprise that these duotone variants have earned a Rolexicon of fond nicknames. The 1955 original’s blue (night hours) and red (day hours) 24-hour bezel configuration was almost-instantly the ‘Pepsi’. The red of which proved especially tricky when it came to the Cerachrom version of 2014 (alumina was the answer).
The aforementioned 2018 iteration is ‘Root Beer’, and 2013 – initially nicknamed ‘Bruiser’ – was dubbed as ‘Batman’. Now, with the pleasing symmetry of 2024’s black and grey combination, both collectors and fans have unanimously settled on a fitting name: ‘Bruce Wayne’.
The test pilots of NASA’s X-Plane programme would have no doubt pledged their allegiance.
Photography Jess Bonham
Set Design Hana Al-Sayed
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