Military watches, as their name suggests, were developed for the armed forces. The first armed forces watches were naval pieces, chronometers that worked OK for their purposes, but as other branches of the army – aviation particularly – made major technical advances round the time of the second World War, correct measurement of the seconds became urgent.
As the old chestnut goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ and Navigator ( often called ‘Pilot’ ) watches were born. In the Navigator watch design, the seconds bezel allowed the pilot to synchronize the second hand with a correct reference time before takeoff, and to make manual corrections to radio time signals while in flight, thus dumping any ‘chronometer inaccuracies’ and the navigational errors that would result.
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