Design matters | Watch history | How it works
Pogue won
Great watch wearers
Shines under pressure
The C60 Trident Pro 600, with a stainless steel case and full-lume bezel featuring top grade SuperLumiNova®, gives a glowing performance all the way down to 600m. It more than holds its own against other professional dive watches – at a price point they can’t reach without cracking their profit margins. Do your research.
What was the first automatic chronograph worn in space? You’d think one of the famous Omega Speedmasters of the Apollo astronauts, but no – they were all hand-wound. For years, people thought it was the Sinn 140, worn by the German, Reinhard Furrer, on a Spacelab mission. But that’s not right either. More recently, eagle-eyed watch-spotters have spied a different beast on the wrist of Lt Colonel William Pogue, an astronaut on the 1973-’74 NASA mission, Skylab 4. It was a relatively humble Seiko 6139 Automatic Chronograph, which he’d bought from the post exchange store at Ellington Air Force Base and, although not NASA Flight-Approved, had sneaked into space anyway. Why, when he’d been given an official Speedmaster Pro for the task? Because, Pogue said, they only got those watches late in training, and he’d got used to his own Seiko for timing engine burns in the simulator. Popping it into a leg pocket, he’d kept it there until reaching orbit, from then on wearing both watches at the same time – the Omega (set to Greenwich Mean Time) on his right wrist and his Seiko (set to US Central Time) on his left.
subsidiary dial at 6 o’clock; there wasn’t even a running seconds hand. The yellow-dialled variation with its Pepsi bezel – as worn by Pogue – is the most iconic of the 6139s (they also came with blue or silver faces), and was the first in a solid run of collectable, but still highly affordable, early Seiko automatic chronographs. Indeed, the very similar 6138, which came – confusingly, considering the name – a couple of years later has developed quite a cult following too. This variation added a 12-hour register, and came in assorted cases, colours and variations, earning them a raft of nicknames: UFO, Bullhead, Jumbo and Kakume.
This 84-day mission was the third and last to use the United States’ original space station, and the Seiko performed perfectly throughout. What makes all this especially remarkable is that the 6139 was never an especially expensive or complicated watch, with a simple 30-minute counter in a single
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The Seiko 6139 is an important watch for another reason, of course. In the late ’60s, a race had started to develop the first automatic chronograph movement. Zenith-Movado was in there, with its El Primero; so were Heuer and Breitling-Leonidas, which led a consortium now called the Chronomatic Group, also including Hamilton-Buren and chronograph specialist Dubois-Depraz, to create the famous Calibre 11. And then, on the other side of the world, there was Seiko. People still debate who ‘won’ – Zenith was first to reveal a prototype, the Chronomatic guys were the first to display multiple pre-production samples, but it was Seiko that seems to have sold the first watches to actual punters, albeit in Japan only. We’re giving that as two wins to the humble Seiko, then: the first automatic chronograph (arguably), and definitely the first automatic chronograph into space.