NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Paul Dolkas
Date: 2020 Jan 2, 18:34 -0800
All-
The Stauer is simply a cheap knock-off of a very famous pilot’s watch: the Breitling Montbrilliant.Here’s the original:
The Breitling folks were the ones who popularized (but didn’t actually invent) the slide rule bezel, with their “Chronomat” back in the early 40’s. It was originally intended for engineers and businessmen who needed to have a slide rule on hand at all times. It quickly caught on with pilots however, and so they re-introduced it as the iconic “Navitimer” a few years later, and the afor-mentioned “Montbrilliant a few years after that. You can still buy them new & essentially unchanged today - that is should you have almost $6500 sitting around gathering dust.
Both Montbrilliant and Navitimer are essentially the same thing mechanically. They are both chronographs, i.e. they combine a watch and a stop watch into the same instrument. (The red hand is for the stopwatch). Essentially the only difference between the two is that the Montbrilliant has that red digital seconds scale for the stopwatch, which breaks a minute into 100ths so you don’t have to do the math.
Paul Dolkas
