By Joe Berk
It was an impulse buy, the kind of purchase that folks who send out marketing emails hope to induce, and it my case, it worked spectacularly well. My new Citizen chronograph is rose gold (something I’m a sucker for), with a leather band (something else I’m a sucker for), and both the leather band and the watch face are Navy blue (something I’m…well, you know where this is going). As it was over $100, there was free shipping (something that always gets my attention). And finally, there was the sale price: $144, down from $395. I am a soft touch for great deals on wristwear, weapons, and other assorted toys that find their way into the ExNotes blog.
All that was cool, but after I clicked buy now and typed in my credit card info, I studied the chronograph bezel markings. I was intrigued by the notation “Base 30 Pulsations.” You can see it on the outer bezel between the 12:00 and 2:00 positions. As much as I like watches in general and chronometers in particular, I had never heard of such a thing before I bought the watch you see above.
It was off to Googleville, and like always, Google came through.
The Base 30 Pulsation system came about in the early days of watchdom as a tool for doctors to quickly measure a person’s pulse rate. The way it works is that you start the stopwatch (the chronometer) and count 30 heartbeats for whoever’s pulse you’re taking. When you hit 30 beats, you stop the chronometer. The chronometer’s second hand will point to the patient’s pulse rate. If the pulse rate is the normal 60 beats per minute, the second hand will point to 60 on the outer bezel, which makes sense because if you had 30 beats in 30 seconds, well, your pulse rate would be 6o beats per minute. This is cool stuff.
That got me to thinking: Are there other chronometers out there with bezels marked in the 30 Base system? Yep, and some are even by Citizen. They have an identical model to the one you see above in stainless steel with a brown leather band and an ivory face:
I’d seen the above watch (the ivory-faced one) in the display case at my local Costco, but I can’t remember what they were asking for it and I couldn’t find it on the Costco website. I’m pretty sure it’s still in the store. If you can’t find one at your local Costco, there are a bunch of retailers selling them on Ebay.
I also found a couple more stainless steel Base 30 versions of the Citizen in different colors on Amazon:
Amazon’s prices were in the $250 to $275 range for the above watches. Those might be decent prices, but Jomas (www.Jomashop.com) has them all beat at $144 (which is what I paid for mine).
A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
– Anonymous
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