Jet travel really ought to be filed under ‘miracles we take for granted’. What, after all, could be more romantic, more thrilling — more impossible-yet-doable — than being whisked through the air to far-flung destinations in a comfortable lounge-like setting in which food and wine is served, and doing so at roughly 40 times the speed that the steamships of yore once took to make the same journeys?

In the 1950s, the world was still startled by the very idea that one could suddenly journey unfathomable distances to culturally alien shores in the time it once took to cross our relatively minuscule island of Britain by car. And so the culture around aviation — including the way people dressed for it — lived
up to its extraordinary reality, especially when it came to the watches that well-heeled itinerants wore, as moving between time zones became de rigueur (as early as 1931 Louis Cottier created a movement capable of showing all of the 24 time zones that had been introduced to the world back in 1884).

As such, the 1950s and 1960s became known as aviation’s golden age. And, given that the best style codes to come out of the era also form the raison d’être of this publication, we were thrilled to discover that Carl F. Bucherer — whose reputation for drawing on watchmaking heritage while simultaneously tapping into the zeitgeist and pioneering for the future is unsurpassed — had turned to their archives from the 1950s to create the Heritage Worldtimer before you.

The new 30.6mm pieces offer yet another masterclass in balancing heritage with modernity (the names of cities on that aforementioned outer disk, for example, have been adjusted to reflect today’s key centres of gravity, but the font in which they’re written is faithful to the original).