Its serial number dates it to early 1965. What we have here is a Breitling Top Time 2002. “Today’s young man wants an instrument panel on his wrist, not just a watch” and “even young women are discovering exciting new elegance in the aggressive look of the chrono-type timepiece”.
In constructing their marketing strategy for the newly optimistic 1960’s, Breitling struck upon the idea of targeting the “staggering purchasing power of the youth market”.
That watch would go on to become one of the first to be used in space on the wrist of astronaut Scott Carpenter on his orbital flight aboard the Aurora 7 capsule in 1962. Its iconic Navitimer featured a slide rule rotating bezel that became indispensable to pilots in the 1950’s and 60’s in helping them with their onboard calculations of air speed, distance, fuel consumption and rates of climb and descent. Prior to its decline, fall and reinvention, Breitling had established a reputation as a specialist producer of chronographs and timers, with a particular focus on the aviation industry, supplying cockpit instruments to aircraft manufacturers as well as wristwatches to pilots and navigators. Oh and they make something called ‘The Emergency’.
My previous knowledge of Breitling extended as far as being aware that the company had gone bust towards the end of the 1970’s, was subsequently bought by Sicura, and that, in its current incarnation as the producer of over-sized shiny and somewhat ostentatious watches, it is affectionately often referred to as Breitbling. My consolation prizes included, notably, a somewhat industrial-looking watch demagnetizer, that has since turned out to be brilliantly effective and now indispensable and secondly a partially disassembled, water-damaged 1960’s Breitling Top Time, missing a number of key parts, but still sufficiently charismatic to excite a momentary uplifting in the spirit associated with the prospect of a tangential diversion into the unknown and unfamiliar.
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