Breitling Celebrates Scott Carpenter’s 100th Birthday With Platinum Cosmonaute; Timex Adds More Cool Divers; Stowa's Bauhaus-Inspired Antea Classic KS; Arnold & Son Teams Up With Chronopassion

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Yesterday was a rough day, a TON of work to do, so I made quite a lot of mistakes in the newsletter. Sorry about that, I assume you managed to fight through my jibber jabber.

In this issue:

• Breitling Celebrates Scott Carpenter’s 100th Birthday With A Platinum Navitimer B02 Chronograph 41 Cosmonaute

• Timex Adds More Cool Divers To The Lineup With Three New Deepwater Meridian 200

• Stowa Releases Bauhaus-Inspired Antea Classic KS In Rose Gold and Anthracite

• Arnold & Son Teams Up With Paris-Based Retailer Chronopassion For A Double Tourbillon Landscape

👂What’s new

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Breitling Celebrates Scott Carpenter’s 100th Birthday With A Platinum Navitimer B02 Chronograph 41 Cosmonaute

Back in the 1960s, as America was still running the Mercury space program, one of the original seven astronauts Scott Carpenter wore a Navitimer on the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission, America’s second orbital spaceflight. He had asked Breitling to modify the Navitimer for space exploration, with a wider bezel that has a better grip for easier operation in space, and a 24-hour dial for easier tracking of day and night. This watch was called the Cosmonaute and Breitling recently brought it back as a standard edition in their lineup. Now, the brand is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the man who made it famous, Scott Carpenter, with a limited edition Navitimer B02 Chronograph 41 Cosmonaute done up in platinum.

The new model comes in a platinum case which measures 41mm wide, 13mm thick and has a 47mm lug-to-lug. It retains the Navitimer’s sweeping, facetted lugs and classic chronograph pump pushers. On top is a sapphire crystal surrounded by a thin metal bezel to allow as much view of the dial as possible, including the internal bi-directional bezel with slide rule scale. Water resistance is 30 meters, but then again, if you have water in your rocket, you have other problems than water resistance of your watch.

The dial features a beautiful sunray brushed blue dial that varies from very light to very dark, depending on the light that hits it, with white Arabic numerals that count up to 24, because this isn’t a 12 hour indicator — the hands rotate fully once every 24 hours.. Surrounding the dial is a white slide rule bezel, with three sunken snailed white sub-dials. The dial at 6 features a very well hidden date indicator. Of note is that the majority of Navitimer models we’ve seen over the past few years have had black sub-dials, so the white is quite the departure. The hands on the sub-dials are blue, while the central chronograph hand is bright red with a white arrow tip.

Inside, you’ll find the Breitling Manufacture Calibre B02, a manual-winding column-wheel chronograph. It beats at 4Hz, has a 70 hour power reserve and is COSC certified. It’s also finished with radial Côtes de Genève emanating from the exposed balance wheel and has engravings commemorating Carpenter’s historic flight such as ‘Aurora 7’ and ‘3 orbits around the Earth’. The watch comes on a blue alligator leather strap with a white gold folding clasp.

The new Breitling Navitimer B02 Chronograph 41 Cosmonaute Scott Carpenter Centenary is limited to 50 pieces and priced at €42,000. See more on the Breitling website.

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Timex Adds More Cool Divers To The Lineup With Three New Deepwater Meridian 200

A large part of the success Timex has seen recently has come from them recreating some of their best watches from the 1970s and 1980s. Lately, they’ve even been dipping into 1990s designs. But every now and again, they work on their more contemporary designs. And even when they do that, they really make a great watch. Like, for example, the Deepwater Meridian 200 line, one of their modern divers that has great specs for not a lot of money.

While their recently released Deepwater Reef came in at a reasonable 41mm, the Meridian 200 line is a much bolder take on a diver. The stainless steel cases measure 44mm wide, but just 11mm thick, making them quite a presence on the wrist. Two of the new references come in regular steel cases, while one gets a dark gunmetal treatment on the case. All three come with unidirectional rotating bezels with 60 minute diving scales — available in either blue or black — sapphire crystals with a date cyclops, and a screw down crown that gives you 200 meters of water resistance.

The dials are available in either blue on the steel case, or black on the steel and coated gunmetal versions. You also get applied round hour markers with trapezoids at the cardinal positions, and a date aperture at 9 o’clock. The bases of all the dials have grooved waves cut into them for a look that punches way above its price point.

Inside, to no surprise when you saw that thickness, you’ll find a quartz analogue movement, which will run for months very accurately, exactly what you need in an affordable diver, perfect for the summer. The regular steel versions come on color-matched synthetic rubber straps, while the gunmetal case gets a bright yellow rubber strap.

The new Timex Meridian Deepwater 200 is available now, priced at €249 for the regular steel version and €259 for the gunmetal coated one. See more on the Timex website.

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Stowa Releases Bauhaus-Inspired Antea Classic KS In Rose Gold and Anthracite

While best known these days for their pilots watches, in the 1930s Stowa made a run of watches made in collaboration with the dial company Weber & Baral in Pforzheim that reflected the minimalist ethos of the German-based Bauhaus school of design. Now, the brand is bringing the design back in the Antea Classic KS, with two new dials, a rose gold and anthracite. To be clear, the Antea is not a new model for Stowa, but the new thing here is the “KS”, which stands for kleiner Sekunde, or small seconds.

The Antea is quite a compact watch, measuring 35.5mm wide and 6.9mm thick. The case is elegantly round, with a polished finish and slim bezel, along with straight lugs that angle down sharply at their ends. There are sapphire crystals on top and bottom, along with 30 meters of water resistance, about as much you would expect from a dress watch.

The dials of these new models takes a lot from the historical model, with a sunburst finish on both the gold and anthracite models. Shared between the two models are also heat blued hands and a slightly recessed and snailed small seconds counter at 6 o’clock. The gold dial has black elongated Roman numerals at XII, III, VI and IX o’clock and slim baton indices, while the anthracite has those in white.

Inside, you’ll find the familiar manual-winding Peseux 7001 movement, often used in dress watches for its compact size. The movement beats at 21,600vph and has a 46 hour power reserve. Finishing includes horizontal ribbing on the bridges, sunray finishes on the ratchet and crown wheels, perlage on the base plate and heat-blued screws. The watches come on either a black leather strap or a Milanese strap.

The new Stowa Antea Classic KS is available now, priced at a quite reasonable €1,200 on leather and €1,270 on the Milanese. See more on the Stowa website.

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Arnold & Son Teams Up With Paris-Based Retailer Chronopassion For A Double Tourbillon Landscape

For more than 10 years, Arnold & Son have been making one of the best watches money can buy. In 2014, they introduced the Double Tourbillon Escapement which showed two different time zones on two dials with two gear trains and tourbillons. Since then, they released a bunch of really nice special edition versions with a whole slew of interesting dials. For their latest DTE, Arnold & Son teams up with Paris-based retailer of wonderful watches Chronopassion for the Double Tourbillon “Landscape.”

While the DTE comes in 37.3mm and 43.5mm, this Landscape version comes in the larger case. That means that it’s made out of 18k white gold, measuring 43.5mm wide. For the life of me, I couldn’t find the thickness anywhere, but I assume it’s surprisingly thin, despite the heavily domed sapphire crystal on top. I base that guess on the fact that the 37.3mm version measures just 8.35mm thick. The lugs are short and angled down, and there are two flat crowns at what could be the 1:30 and 7:30 positions on the case. Interestingly, you get 30 meters of water resistance. Who would have expected that on such a watch.

This version gets a dial base made out of landscape jasper, a mineral that exhibits wonderful earthy hues. The piece of stone has been selected by Chronopassion to match their taste. The Double Tourbillon displays two time zones with two small dials, with the one at 12 o’clock using Roman numerals on a white base, and the one at 6 o’clock using Arabic numerals, also on white. These two dials display hours and minutes that are completely independent. At the 3 and 9 o’clock positions you’ll find the two tourbillons using a skeletonised, cantilevered bridge in white gold.

Powering all of this is the A&S8513 calibre, which has two barrels to power the two time zones. The movement beats at 21,600vph and has a 90 hour power reserve. It is, of course, impeccably decorated. It includes radiating Côtes de Genève stripes, a circular-grained mainplate, double-snailed barrels, sunray-brushed crown wheels and polished gold chatons. The watch comes on a desert beige alligator leather strap with a blue lining and a white gold folding clasp.

The new Arnold & Son x Chronopassion Double Tourbillon “Landscape” is a piece unique, available only from the Chronopassion store in Paris and priced at €269,100. See more on the Arnold & Son website.

⏲️Wait a minute

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Ernest Hemingway once argued that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the headwaters for “all modern American literature,” adding, “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Plenty of writers, including William Faulkner, argued much the same. “Why,” John Jeremiah Sullivan asks, “has it so often seemed necessary to claim Twain in this fashion?” For Harper’s, Sullivan floats the river of our recent Twain revival and his own lifelong fixation, turning over Percival Everett’s James and a new biography from Ron Chernow, raising new testimonials about Samuel Clemens from the archives, and trying to explain the long impact of an author and man who “doesn’t quite haunt us.”

• Mike Smith had achieved financial success with his string of medical clinics. But he wanted more. He and collaborator Jonathan Hay released a jazz album together in 2017; it did well on the streaming platforms, until it got flagged for fraud. What Hay didn’t know about his musical partner is that streaming fraud was just the tip of the crime iceberg.

• Porn has always been a clear indicator of which technology will catch on. That’s why I’m still skeptical whether AI is tech that will stay or just a fad, as we still haven’t seen any revolutionary uses of AI in porn. However, we might be hitting a wall of porn being a beacon of human development, as a few wacky religious nuts in the US are bringing a lawsuit to the Supreme Court to ban porn forever. This would be a huge hit, as most of the porn is produced in the US, but if it does happen, I can’t wait to see how we Europeans step up.

👀Watch this

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How are Samurai films and a car crash responsible for Star Wars? How did World War II affect the global film industry in the 20th century? Why are Jedi called Jedi? This 8 minute video explains it all.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk