Tag: Omega

The Wayback Machine: Marking Time

By Joe Berk

I’ve always been a watch guy. It probably started when my parents surprised me with a Timex when I was a kid. The thought of having my own wristwatch was heady stuff for a boy back on the east coast (or anywhere else, I imagine). To make a long story short, I’ve been a watch collector ever since. I don’t specialize, and many times I won’t keep a watch forever. If I like the way a watch looks and it’s not crazy expensive, I’ll wear it for a while, with the duration of “a while” usually determined by the time it takes for the next interesting thing to catch my eye.

The real deal: Apollo 15 Astronaut Dave Scott’s Bulova, which sold for a cool $1.625 million at auction.

I make no excuses: I like watches, and I always wonder about guys who don’t wear them. Not wearing a watch is a common thing with young guys today. When I taught in Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, one of my topics focused on how to do well in an interview. My guidance was simple. Dress sharply, be early, look the interviewer right in the eye, speak up, don’t use the word “like” incessantly when you speak, and wear a watch. A lot of kids today don’t wear watches. If they have any interest in knowing what time it is, they look at their iPhone. That’s a no go, I’d tell my students. If you don’t wear a watch, the person interviewing you will conclude you have no sense of time-based urgency. It’s what I always concluded when someone showed up not wearing a watch.

Anyway, to get to the subject of this blog, I want to tell you about the Bulova Lunar Pilot. It’s a cool piece with an interesting story that goes like this: With the advent of the Apollo lunar exploration program (the NASA endeavor to put men on the moon), the US government decided we needed an official space watch. Omega won the competition with their Speedmaster watch, and for the next 14 missions, that’s what astronauts wore.

Here’s where it gets complicated and where the story gets Internet-fuzzy. Depending on which source you believe, Astronaut Dave Scott wore a Bulova watch on the Apollo 15 mission for one of the following reasons:

He wore the Bulova watch because his Omega broke.
He wore the Bulova watch because he felt like it.
He wore the Bulova watch because Bulova was trying to replace Omega as the official NASA watch.
He wore the watch because the US government, Bulova, or other parties wanted the official watch to be something made in America.

Whatever the reason (and you can find stories supporting each of the above floating around in that most authoritative of all sources, the Internet), Dave Scott wore the Bulova on the Apollo 15 mission, and Omega went from being “the only watch worn on the moon” to “the first watch worn on the moon.” It could not have gone over well at the Omega factory.

Dave Scott’s original Bulova, the one he wore on the moon, sold at auction a few years ago. The predicted auction price was $50,000. As predictions go, it wasn’t a very good one. When the gavel came down and the dust cleared, Scott’s Bulova sold for a cool $1.3 million. Throw in the auction commission and other fees, and you’re talking about a $1.625-million wristwatch. Wowee!

Bulova, today no longer an American watch company (they were bought by Citizen a few years ago) recognized a marketing opportunity when it fell into their laps, and they re-issued an internally updated version of Scott’s watch as the Bulova Lunar Pilot, complete with a 262 kHz Accutron movement. I have no idea what a 262 kHz movement is, except that the Bulova marketing hype tells me it means it’s super accurate.

The not-so-real deal, but a hell of a deal nonetheless: The Bulova Lunar Pilot, purchased for just under $300.  Yep, as I type this, I’m wearing my Bulova.

The increased accuracy really didn’t matter to me when I saw the watch (I’m retired now and I seldom need 262 kHz accuracy when I decide I feel like going somewhere), so that’s not what prompted me to pull the trigger. I just like the way it looks, I like the swirl of stories around the original Bulova moon watch, and my Dad wore a Bulova when I was a kid.

Oh, one other thing helped…a trick that has prompted me to pull the trigger on other discretionary purposes.  You know how the Internet spies on us, right?  I mean, folks complain all the time about looking at something on Amazon or whatever and then it starts showing up in their Facebook feed.   That’s not always a bad thing.  When I first looked at the Bulova Lunar Pilot it was a $600 bauble.   I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money, and I guess the spymasters/Internet marketeers figured that one out.  They and I knew it was a waiting game to see who would blink first.  Because I had looked for the watch on Amazon, I started getting emails from different retailers to buy the watch for less, and I let those roll in.  Delete, delete, delete, and then one day, an offer floated into my inbox for $299.  Hmmm.  Delete.  And sure enough, a day or two later and that $299 offer came with a coupon for $20 off and free shipping on my first order.  Ka ching!

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Bond. Titanium Bond.

A watch is a personal and emotional purchase, much like a motorcycle or a rifle.   By definition, whatever you choose is perfect and the best; what anyone else chooses is not and is somehow indicative of a deep-seated character flaw.  I get that.

Having said that, I never got the attraction of an Omega wristwatch.  I know some folks love them and if you wear an Omega, more power to you.  It’s just not me, which is why I found the attractive young lady pushing the latest Omega at me amusing.

Omega, you see, never misses a marketing opportunity, and their latest product placement achievement is the new Bond movie, No Time To Die.  In it, 007 wears a titanium Omega Seamaster. The high end watch store in Palo Alto had a couple of the titanium Bond Omegas in stock, and the young sales lady was attempting what could only be described as a hard sell.  She was new to these shores, I think, and evidently convinced that if James Bond wore a titanium Omega, every man in America would want one as well.

“Bond wears,” she kept repeating, as if that was all it would take to get me to plunk down $9800 for an Omega (it would actually take a lot more, like maybe a $9700 discount).  Before I realized it, she had unbuckled my Casio Marlin (the best deal in a dive watch ever and one I wear frequently), and she had the titanium Bond on my wrist.  She would have made a good pickpocket.

“Bond wears,” she said again.

I wondered if she realized Bond is a fictional character.

The titanium Seamaster was light, almost like a plastic watch.  I could barely detect its presence.  I didn’t care for the look of the mesh bracelet, but damn, that thing was a feather.

“NATO Bond,” she said, pushing another titanium Bond Seamaster at me, this one with a cloth NATO band.  NATO watchbands…that’s another fad I never fell for.  They look cheap.  I was in the US Army and the only special watchbands I ever saw were the velcro bands paratroopers wear (they tear away if your watch gets caught on the door when exiting an aircraft…you lose your watch but you get to keep your arm, which isn’t a bad deal if you think about it).  I’m pretty sure guys in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t actually wear NATO bands, but what do I know?

I like the look of a dive watch and I own a couple of them.  My tastes run toward high quality and low cost, so my personal favorites are the Casio Marlin (a watch I’ve written about before) and a Seiko Batman I bought at Costco a few years ago.  The Marlin was $39, it keeps superb time, it looks good, and it works well (it’s the watch I wore when I rode through Colombia).  The Marlin did just fine in the Andes’ torrential rains.  I’ve never tried the Marlin in the deep blue sea, though.  I’m not a diver and I really don’t know how well it would work as a dive watch.  But I’m not a fictional British secret agent, either, so unlike Daniel Craig I don’t need the titanium Bond watch.  If I need external inspiration, I’ll take it elsewhere. Bill Gates wears a Casio Marlin and even though he doesn’t have a blog or a motorcycle, he’s real and he seems to have done okay.  But I don’t need to emulate other people.  I just wear watches I find appealing.

I asked the young sales lady where she was from and she said Cupertino.  No, originally, I asked.  “China,” she said.  I asked where and she told me (it was a city in Hebei Province), I told her I had been there, and we chatted about the ride Gresh and I did across China.  She told me I had been to more places in China than she had.  I wore a Timex on that ride, I told her, like Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the Chinese guys called me Dàshū, which means “big uncle,” so it sort of fit).  She laughed, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t know what I was talking about. Sometimes that makes for the best conversations.

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The Omega Speedmaster

I mentioned my Bulova Lunar Pilot watch (one we’ve done a blog on before) to one of my gun buddies, and he told me that he had the Omega version of that watch.

The Omega Speedmaster on the left, and my Bulova Lunar Pilot on the right. The Omega is a tiny bit smaller, which I prefer.
A closer shot of the Omega. It has a curved crystal, which made photographing it without glare a bit of a challenge.
The back of the Omega. It’s a classy watch.

Actually, it would be more appropriate to call mine the Bulova version of the Omega watch, as the Omega was the first in space and the Bulova came later almost accidentally.  You can read that story here.  Also, my Bulova is a reissued, modified design of the Accutron watch astronaut Dave Scott wore on his Apollo flight.  My buddy’s Omega is a faithful duplicate of the original Speedmaster worn on the Moon. The Omega is a much more expensive mechanical watch, and it is a very classy item.  The Omega Speedmaster sells for thousands of dollars; I paid $275 for my Bulova.

Ah, we’ve got a lot of good stuff coming up on the blog.  Most significantly, Uncle Joe is thinking about getting back on the Zed resurrection.  Send us your comments; we need to keep the pressure on Arjiu to make that happen.

More good blog stuff is in the works, too.  Good buddy Don wrote and asked about the .257 Weatherby No. 1.  I have that rifle back from Ruger.  The boys in New Hampshire put a nice piece of Circassian walnut on it to replace the cracked stock, and it shoots great with a load good buddy Mississippi Dave recommended.   Watch for that story soon.  I’ve got more fun in front of me sorting the Garand’s habit of throwing the first shot of each clip low left, and I’ll write about it here.  And a story requested by good buddy James on the XP100 Remington (I actually owned one of those in the 1970s chambered for the 30×223 cartridge).  And here’s another gun-related topic: We’re thinking of a postal match…you know, a match where you shoot your target and mail it to us.  If you’re interested in participating in something like that, let us know.

We’ve got a movie review coming about The Great Raid (spoiler alert…that movie was great), and a book review about A.J. Baime’s The Arsenal of Democracy (it’s the best book I’ve read this year).  There’s the always moving to the right YooHoo review (hang in there, Fred; it’s coming).  There’s more watch stuff coming, too.  I love my Gear’d Hardware watch, and I’m becoming a real fan of the Casio G-Shock watches.

There’s more motorcycle stuff in the works, too.  I’ve been dreaming about getting back to Baja again, either on one of my CSC bikes or perhaps something different.  I want to look at the Triumphs again; I’ve always loved their motorcycles.  I think I can talk CSC into letting me take a WIZ (whoa, that doesn’t sound right) for a ride.  I won’t take a WIZ to Baja (it’s an electric scooter), but it looks like it would be a hoot to ride locally.   The challenge is finding one; CSC sells them as soon as they get them in stock.  It seems everyone wants to take a WIZ.

We keep talking about making a political comment or two, but hell, no matter what we say we’d upset half our readership.  We had one guy actually bitch about one of the pop-up ads that appear on our site mentioning President Trump, and he had his shorts in a knot about that (off to your safe space, Snowflake, and that ain’t here).  For the record, we don’t control the pop-up ads (the ads appear based on the site’s content, your location, your prior website visits, and other secret stuff that goes into a supersecret algorithm that only God and Google know about).  It’s interesting but unknowable for us mere mortals, but in any event, if an ad appears talking about something that pisses you off, don’t blame us.  And if you really get upset, hell, click on the ad.  Then they have to pay.  And do you know who they pay?   It ain’t Trump!

Well, maybe all this is too controversial.  I’ll go to a safe topic and not ruffle any feathers.  Maybe something about Indian motorcycles and their lineage.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Marking Time

The real deal: Apollo 15 Astronaut Dave Scott’s Bulova, which sold for a cool $1.625 million at auction.

I’ve always been a watch guy. It probably started when my parents surprised me with a Timex when I was a kid. The thought of having my own wristwatch was heady stuff for a boy back on the east coast (or anywhere else, I imagine). To make a long story short, I’ve been a watch collector ever since. I don’t specialize, and many times I won’t keep a watch forever. If I like the way a watch looks and it’s not crazy expensive, I’ll wear it for a while, with the duration of “a while” usually determined by the time it takes for the next interesting thing to catch my eye.

I make no excuses: I like watches, and I always wonder about guys who don’t wear them. Not wearing a watch is a common thing with young guys today. When I taught in Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, one of my topics focused on how to do well in an interview. My guidance was simple. Dress sharply, be early, look the interviewer right in the eye, speak up, don’t use the word “like” incessantly when you speak, and wear a watch. A lot of kids today don’t wear watches. If they have any interest in knowing what time it is, they look at their iPhone. That’s a no go, I’d tell my students. If you don’t wear a watch, the person interviewing you will conclude you have no sense of time-based urgency. It’s what I always concluded when someone showed up not wearing a watch.

Anyway, to get to the subject of this blog, I want to tell you about the Bulova moon watch. It’s a cool piece with an interesting story that goes like this: With the advent of the Apollo lunar exploration program (the NASA endeavor to put men on the moon), the US government decided we needed an official space watch. Omega won the competition with their Speedmaster watch, and for the next 14 missions, that’s what astronauts wore.

Here’s where it gets complicated and where the story gets Internet-fuzzy. Depending on which source you believe, Astronaut Dave Scott wore a Bulova watch on the Apollo 15 mission for one of the following reasons:

He wore the Bulova watch because his Omega broke.
He wore the Bulova watch because he felt like it.
He wore the Bulova watch because Bulova was trying to replace Omega as the official NASA watch.
He wore the watch because the US government, Bulova, or other parties wanted the official watch to be something made in America.

Whatever the reason (and you can find stories supporting each of the above floating around in that most authoritative of all sources, the Internet), Dave Scott wore the Bulova on the Apollo 15 mission, and Omega went from being “the only watch worn on the moon” to “the first watch worn on the moon.” It could not have gone over well at the Omega factory.

Dave Scott’s original Bulova, the one he wore on the moon, sold at auction a few years ago. The predicted auction price was $50,000. As predictions go, it wasn’t a very good one. When the gavel came down and the dust cleared, Scott’s Bulova sold for a cool $1.3 million. Throw in the auction commission and other fees, and you’re talking about a $1.625-million wristwatch. Wowee!

Bulova, today no longer an American watch company (they were bought by Citizen a few years ago) recognized a marketing opportunity when it fell into their laps, and they re-issued an internally updated version of Scott’s watch as the Bulova Moonwatch, complete with a 262 kHz Accutron movement. I have no idea what a 262 kHz movement is, except that the Bulova marketing hype tells me it means it’s super accurate.

The not-so-real deal, but a hell of a deal nonetheless: The Bulova replica Moonwatch, purchased for just under $300.  Yep, as I type this, I’m wearing my Bulova.

The increased accuracy really didn’t matter to me when I saw the watch (I’m retired now and I seldom need 262 kHz accuracy when I decide I feel like going somewhere), so that’s not what prompted me to pull the trigger. I just like the way it looks, I like the swirl of stories around the original Bulova moon watch, and my Dad wore a Bulova when I was a kid.

Oh, one other thing helped…a trick that has prompted me to pull the trigger on other discretionary purposes.  You know how the Internet spies on us, right?  I mean, folks complain all the time about looking at something on Amazon or whatever and then it starts showing up in their Facebook feed.   That’s not always a bad thing.  When I first looked at the Bulova Moonwatch it was a $600 bauble.   I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money, and I guess the spymasters/Internet marketeers figured that one out.  They and I knew it was a waiting game to see who would blink first.  Because I had looked for the watch on Amazon, I started getting emails from different retailers to buy the watch for less, and I let those roll in.  Delete, delete, delete, and then one day, an offer floated into my inbox for $299.  Hmmm.  Delete.  And sure enough, a day or two later and that $299 offer came with a coupon for $20 off and free shipping on my first order.  Ka ching!