IWC Schaffhausen launched a fleet of new Pilot’s watches at SIHH 2016 in Geneva (including a pair of extra-sized Heritage models, a new “Le Petit Prince” annual calendar, and the innovative Timezoner chronograph), continuing the brand’s long and storied heritage as a supplier of timepieces for aviators. Here, courtesy of IWC’s archives, we present a lineup of vintage and modern IWC pilots’ Replica Watches that represent milestones for the brand — and for watchmaking history.
1. The First IWC Watch Ever Taken Into The Sky (1896)
This pocketwatch, with a 14k yellow gold case and containing the IWC-manufactured Caliber 53 movement was sold by IWC on December 1896 to IWC Replica Watches retailer A. Kohler from Leipzig, Germany. Another German, Albert Lotter, inherited the watch from his father in 1916. During the following years the watch and its owner, who lived in Saxony and Berlin, witnessed many 20th-century historical milestones. The watch still operates with good timekeeping precision.
2. IWC’s First “Special Watch for Pilots” (1936)
IWC started focusing on the production of technically advanced watches built specifically for aviation at a very early stage, becoming a true pioneer in this field. Progress made in aviation and navigation had created a growing need for watches that offered maximum reliability under the toughest conditions.
Ernst Jakob Homberger (1869–1955), IWC Fake Watches managing director during the 1930s, had two sons who were so passionate about aviation that they decided to manufacture IWC’s first “special watch for pilots” in 1936. The watch, containing Caliber 83, had a shatterproof crystal, high-contrast hands and numerals, a rotating bezel with an index for recording short periods of time, and an antimagnetic escapement. It was also highly resistant to temperature fluctuations, ranging from –40 degrees Celsius to +40 degrees Celsius.
3. IWC’s First Big Pilot’s Watch (1940)
The first IWC Big Pilot’s Watch was supplied to the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in 1940 in an edition of 1,000 pieces. The “big device,” constructed according to the criteria for an observer’s watch, is the largest wristwatch ever made by Cheap IWC Replica, with a case diameter of 55 mm, a height of 16.5 mm, and a weight of 183 grams.
4. IWC Pilot’s Wristwatch Mark 11 with Nato Strap (1948)
In response to a product requirement from the British government, IWC developed a service watch for pilots of the Royal Air Force (RAF). The technical specifications stipulated by the RAF were very rigid, including a requirement that the movement had to be protected against magnetic fields. Production of the now-legendary IWC Fake Watches Mark 11, with Caliber 89, started in 1948. In November 1949, the watch was supplied to airborne personnel of the RAF and other Commonwealth nations and remained in service until 1981.
5. IWC Pilot’s Watch Chronograph Ceramic (1994)
Forty-eight years after the legendary Mark 11 was launched, IWC built on its Pilot’s Watch tradition with the launch of the IWC Watches. In 1994, IWC launched another Pilot’s Watch Chronograph, intended for modern aviation and equipped with a case made from high-tech zirconium oxide ceramic — a material as hard as sapphire and virtually indestructible. Its movement is caliber 7922.
The IWC Mark XVIII Replica Watches
The first time I ever read anything about the IWC Mark series, it was thanks to (of course) everyone’s favorite non-watchmaker watch writer, the inimitable Walt Odets, who in his series, “Tweaking The Mark XII” called that particular Mark “every non-pilot’s favorite pilot’s watch.” I wasn’t so much interested in the Mark XII as I was interested in what you’d do to tweak a movement so as to wring the best possible precision out of it, at least at first, but like many, I gradually began to find the simplicity, clarity, legibility, and history of the Mark XII irresistible and like many, I’ve followed the evolution of the Mark series ever since then with avid interest.
Overall, the Mark XVIII is one of those Replica Watches that you can simply wear every day, without taking any particular notice of it, which I mean as a compliment. Over the time I wore it it quickly became a matter of habit to pick it up, put it on my wrist, and pretty much forget that it was there unless I needed to check the time. At 40 mm in diameter, and 11mm thick, it’s a watch that has enough substance, and size, to feel and look reassuringly solid when you glance at it, but not to a degree that calls attention to itself in any way when you aren’t using it as it was intended to be used.
A big part of the easy wearing experience is the strap, which is a black strip of pretty heavy-duty feeling calfskin, made by Santoni for IWC Replica Watches, with an eye-catching orange lining. You don’t see it at all when you’ve got the watch on, of course, but the little flash of color you get when you take the Mark XVIII off adds that much more character to the wearing experience. A little touch, but a nice one. The strap, like the watch, has a very substantial feel, and it’s a little stiff at first although it starts to break in nicely after a couple of days. I suspect it’ll age very nicely and become comfortably supple without losing any of its toughness after a few weeks of regular wear, and like the watch itself, it manages to convey a feeling of being able to tolerate hard use, but also not call too much attention to itself. The strap and the watch together definitely feel like a piece of trustworthy equipment.
The time is, as it should be, instantly legible, pretty much under any lighting conditions you could possibly imagine, from direct sunlight to total darkness, thanks to the high contrast dial and generous application of lume on the dial. It’s not as torch-bright as some of the most brightly illuminated IWC Fake Watches I’ve worn, but even after the first bright glow of charged Super Luminova wears off, you can see what time it is just fine. This is a very, very versatile watch as well, thanks to the simplicity and utilitarian nature of the design. Now, about that date window. My impression over the years has been that it is very hard to add a date window to a Mark watch without irreversibly ticking some people off, and deploring the use of any date window on a Mark series timepiece goes all the way back to the Mark XII, which was (of course) deplored in some quarters for diluting the austere beauty of the Mark XI with a reminder of the current date – in white, no less. I don’t think anyone would argue that the position of the date window in the Cheap IWC Replica Mark XVIII is going to rub some of us the wrong way. The two basic objections are to its placement and to its being there at all.
I don’t feel especially passionately on the subject either way. Very often the watch I happen to have on doesn’t have a date guichet, but (and this is just a personal note) I tend to forget the date and I don’t mind having it there on the Mark XVIII. In principle I definitely sympathize with those who wish it weren’t there at all, but in practice I found it something I could simply ignore, and in real life it didn’t bother me in the least. I will say though, that if you hate it in pictures, you’re probably not going to stop hating it if you have the Fake Watches Mark XVIII on your wrist.
The IWC Automatic Aquatimer Replica Watches
Mixed gas diving can take you even deeper though. You can reduce or even get rid of the nitrogen in the gas mixture you are breathing entirely, using other gasses like helium and hydrogen. Each of these, alone or in combination, can create their own problems, as can oxygen – we need oxygen to live, but what makes it essential for energy production in the body is its high chemical reactivity, which is also what makes it potentially dangerous. Deeper than about 60 meters, oxygen toxicity starts to become a problem too, and as you go deeper, you need to keep using less oxygen in your breathing mix. Because the Replica Watches nervous system is so metabolically active it’s especially vulnerable to oxygen toxicity and symptoms can include everything from visual disturbances to convulsions, which would be a sub-optimal event at depth.
However, if you take your time, know what you are doing, and breathe the right gas mixture, you can go shockingly deep. Compagnie Maritime d’Expertises divers reached 534 meters in experimental dives conducted in 1988. At that depth, pressure is 793.211 p.s.i. Now, intuitively it seems like you would simply be, to put it colloquially, squished to death. But IWC Replica Watches remember, as long as the total pressure of all the gasses in your body is equal to the pressure on the outside of your body, you’re good to go – to the extent that a third of a ton of weight per square inch, bearing down on you, in 534 meters of water, is good in any way at all. Your watch, by the way, is still fine and the atmospheric pressure inside the inner watch case is still equal to that at the surface.
This deep, however, physics and the laws of nature have decided that enough is enough, and they are trying to find IWC Fake Watches other ways to kill you. Enter High Pressure Nervous Syndrome. HPNS isn’t well understood even today – it might be due to toxic gas effects, or it could simply be high pressure causing alterations in nervous system functioning, or both. But it seems to be the factor currently limiting human deep diving. Symptoms include all sorts of unfortunate things like tremors, vomiting, and seizures – all things that are, as medical textbooks like to dryly put it, “incompatible with life.” HPNS is more or less completely incapacitating and since we don’t know how to beat it, diving deeper than the 500-600 meter range seems permanently out of reach.
As an illustration of just how powerful water pressure is at such depths, consider a somber event: the 1963 loss, with all hands, of the USS Thresher. The Cheap IWC Replica lead boat of what was to be a new class of ultra-advanced nuclear attack submarines, Thresher was lost when a reactor malfunction left her without power to maneuver. Without the ability to move forward, and trimmed to a slightly negative buoyancy, she began to sink deeper and deeper, eventually imploding as the water pressure outside the hull crushed her. The event was almost unbelievably violent – at the moment of implosion, according to a Navy study conducted in 1969, water entered Thresher at a speed of about 2,600 mph, and it was all over in a tenth of a second. The incident shows clearly that the problem is not so much pressure at depth per se, but rather, pressure difference. The Fake Watches depth at which Thresher’s pressure hull failed is thought to have been just past the current technical limit for human diving – somewhere around 700 meters.
Suppose, though, that it were possible to dive deeper – that HPNS could be defeated, somehow? Well, even the safest inert gasses, like helium, become narcotic if you go deep enough. The problem is that, at this point, we’ve run up against an absence of data. Human experiments in inert gas narcosis and deep diving have never been done at depths even half that of the depth rating of the IWC Replica Watches Aquatimer 2,000 Meters. Unknown (but probably lethal) gas intoxication effects aside, the other problem is that at such extreme depths, breathing gas mixtures eventually become too dense to breathe. One proposed solution: breathing oxygen rich liquid. Such liquids, however, would not be very efficient at removing waste carbon dioxide from the body – even at rest, you’d need to circulate about 5 liters per minute in and out of your lungs. This would be a lot more work than breathing air. So why own or wear a Replica Watches that can so dramatically exceed even the most extreme limits of the environment in which it’s designed to be used? I think the question reflects a misunderstanding in its asking. The fact that the watch so drastically over-performs is in fact the exact reason you would want it. It’s not necessarily a matter of bragging rights, or having a watch that acts as an enabler of idle Walter Mitty fantasies.