The Omega Speedmaster is one of the great iconic watches of the entire world of horology. In its 60 year history, there have been many variations of the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch alone, that's it's sometimes hard to decipher what the differences are, and ultimately decide which one to get.
Our watch expert Michael will make it simple for you! Get to know the different versions of the Omega Speedmaster with our Speedmaster 101 review.
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Transcript:
SwissWatchExpo, fresh from the Showcase here. I'm going to help you make heads or tails of all these Speedmasters. The Omega Speedmaster is one of the great iconic watches of the entire world of watches, but where do you start? There's so many different variations. It's hard to even kind of get a radar on what all the differences would be and what the choices are. I'm going to make it simple for you. The original Moonwatch, we call it now the Omega Speedmaster, came out in 1957. It was not geared towards space travel or the moon or anything like that. It's a Speedmaster because it is a racing watch. It is made for timing road events, but it also could be used for timing anything else. The great idea behind the Speedmaster that had never been done before was by moving the tachymeter scale out to the bezel, instead of having it on the dial. It really made the Speedmaster sort of a timing computer on your wrist, so that not just measuring things off by how many seconds or minutes they took, but also being able to convert that into units per hour.
That was the big advance on that time in the late fifties, early sixties was kind of the golden age of Motorsports. It was a lot easier for amateurs to be able to afford the kinds of cars that were used in racing. There were racing leagues all over the country. There weren't as many enforcement of the laws about speed on public roads at the time. Now it was a different time and it really is even reflected in the advertising of the age for the Speedmaster. But then of course, the giant step forward, for man and for the watch, came in the 1960s when NASA flight-qualified the watch. It went up against several other watches and you can read all about that. It's a great story. How Omega became the only watch flight-qualified by NASA for space travel, but when Buzz Aldrin stepped out of that Apollo spacecraft onto the surface of the moon wearing his Omega Speedmaster, it became the Moonwatch.
Incidentally, that particular one that Buzz Aldrin was wearing went missing later. He was mailing it to the Air and Space Museum from Texas and it somehow got lost. If you ever find that one particular Buzz Aldrin Speedmaster you'll have a real treasure on your hands. But over the years, there've been a lot of variations that have come out since then. That's what we want to talk about this morning. The first consideration is which size you want. The original Moonwatch is a 42-millimeter and it's handwound mechanical, meaning that you're going to wind it every morning. It's not automatic and it does not have the date. If you insist on an automatic movement and the date, then you're not going to get the 42-millimeter Speedmaster.
That means you're either going to go with a 39-millimeter reduced, a little bit smaller case diameter, smaller bracelet, or you're going to go with the more modern 40-millimeter Speedmaster racing, or the 44 and a quarter millimeter Speedmaster coaxial. I'll show you some variations on those as we go through. But let's just say you decided that you're a purist, you want the 42-millimeter, you want the original Moonwatch, there's something certainly about the idea that you can still buy the watch, essentially unchanged more or less from the original watch that went to the moon. This is the one that you saw in that movie about Apollo 13, where the Speedmaster was what was used to time that 14-second burn that saved the astronauts lives. This is the watch. When we look at these on the 42-millimeter Speedmaster professional, that's the only one that's actually the Moonwatch.
It does say on the back of the one that has the original plastic Hesalite crystal, and on the back, it says flight-qualified by NASA for all manned space missions. This is the one, when we talk about this crystal, it is a heavy duty plexiglass.
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6 авг 2020
